Nucor Corporation, a Fortune 300 company headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, is one of the largest steel producers in the United States, and the largest of the “mini-mill” operators. The total annual steelmaking capacity of the company is 25 million tons.

As one of Nucor’s public brands, Nucor Building Systems began in 1987 with the construction of the first Nucor steel building systems division in Waterloo, Indiana. As a result of continued success and focus on long-term growth, Nucor Building Systems now has four manufacturing operations located in Waterloo, Ind.; Swansea, S.C.; Terrell, Texas; and Brigham City, Utah. According to the corporate website, the advantage of metal buildings is that “design, fabrication, and construction times are greatly reduced. And future expansion is uncomplicated. Custom engineering and design of today’s metal buildings allow owners to have the look they want, with the functionality they need.”

The Brigham City location (Nucor Building Systems Utah, LLC) employs approximately 200. Prior to switching to the UTOPIA network in 2010, Nucor experienced slow response across the company WAN between the Utah location and sister divisions in Indiana, South Carolina, and Texas, according to Steve Reynolds, IT Supervisor. Nucor needed increased bandwidth to accommodate the growing needs of the business.

“Nucor’s decision to locate in Brigham City was partly influenced by the availability of UTOPIA, and once we were able to switch to the network, the increased bandwidth made data transfer and replication exponentially faster,” Reynolds explains.

According to Reynolds, Nucor has various processes and software programs that have to have access to database servers across the company’s WAN. “The increased bandwidth UTOPIA has provided allows increased speed in those processes and programs, thus giving our users a better and faster experience than before. Video conferencing has come in to play since we now have the bandwidth to support it, too.”

These efficiencies have translated into dollar savings for Nucor. “Time is money and the increased speed with which we access the Internet and run our internal processes and programs reduced the wait time we previously experienced before moving to UTOPIA,” Reynolds says. “With video conferencing becoming more prevalent we can avoid some travel costs and collaborate on projects over the Internet.”