Project Manager
Ron Reehling

For several years, Purdue's Dairy Research and Education Center (DREC) sought to upgrade their 12-stall milking parlor. The project had difficulty getting off the ground, however, until a new procurement method, Job Order Contracting (JOC), was offered by Physical Facilities.

Purdue owns the dairy farm, located off State Road 600 N. in Tippecanoe County, and utilizes the facility for research and education, as well as commercial milk production. Over time, the milking parlor became outdated. The College of Agriculture considered the failing equipment to be creating an unsafe work environment, and ill-suited to meet their research and educational needs. In addition, maintenance and repair costs were mounting.

Location: Dairy Research and Education Center

Client: College of Agriculture

Contractor: Centennial Contractor Enterprises

Project Manager:
Ronald Reehling

Project Budget: $445,000

Milking parlor, before

To address these concerns and modernize the facility, the College of Agriculture chose to employ JOC—in which project design and cost proposal development take place simultaneously to reduce planning time, with the same contractor performing the construction work. From approval to completion, the project took just six months.

The project would have been completed even sooner except for an unanticipated need to reroute the underground electrical supply, and a slower than expected time for equipment delivery due to manufacturing delays.

Milking parlor, before

The new milking parlor features state-of-the-art modular dairy stalls, which due to their innovative design, could be installed in one day. To minimize disruption to the dairy's operations, half of the parlor was taken down for the upgrades while the other half was in active use for the twice-daily milkings of their 200 cows. Though project planners anticipated a month of expanded milking times, thanks to the cooperation of DREC, Centennial Contractors, and Physical Facilities, the process only took a week.

The new 16-stall equipment

Twelve outdated stalls made way for 16 new stalls that help increase the efficiency of the dairy farm's operations.

“We were very pleased with how this project went, and how the JOC process worked,” says Mike Grott, manager of the Dairy Research and Education Center.

As a Repair and Rehabilitation project, the $455,000 budget received $227,500 in matching funds. Construction began in mid-April, and finished in mid-June.

Cows being milked by the new modular milking equipment.