Manufacturing Facility Roofing

Georgia's manufacturing base has expanded significantly over the past decade - Kia's assembly plant in West Point, Caterpillar's Athens facility, and Hyundai's Bryan County megasite are the headline anchors of a statewide manufacturing buildout that extends into the Atlanta metro's industrial corridors. Manufacturing buildings are large, continuously operated, and structurally demanding for roofing work.

Georgia's automotive and heavy manufacturing buildout has produced some of the largest commercial roofing footprints in the Southeast. Kia Georgia's West Point assembly plant covers approximately 2.2 million square feet of manufacturing space - one of the largest single-building footprints in the state. Caterpillar's Athens facility produces large construction equipment on a campus that includes multiple manufacturing and assembly buildings. Hyundai Motor Group's Metaplant in Bryan County, which came online in 2024, represents a new generation of EV assembly facilities in Georgia with specific roofing requirements tied to the thermal management demands of battery assembly environments.

The Atlanta metro itself hosts a significant manufacturing base outside of these headline facilities. The Lockheed Martin plant in Marietta - though historically better known as an aerospace facility - is Georgia's largest manufacturing employer by headcount and represents the anchor of the Cobb County industrial cluster. The I-85 northeast corridor through Gwinnett County houses automotive supplier and light manufacturing facilities that have grown alongside the metro's population. The I-20 west corridor through Douglas and Carroll Counties links the metro to the LaGrange and West Point manufacturing cluster where Kia and its supplier base are concentrated.

From our office in Atlanta, we reach the Marietta Lockheed campus in 30 minutes, the Gwinnett manufacturing corridor in 40 minutes, and the West Point / LaGrange area in approximately 100 minutes. For major capital projects at out-of-metro facilities, we deploy project management and crew resources directly to the site.

Production line continuity is the overriding constraint for manufacturing facility roofing. An automotive assembly plant runs on a production schedule measured in vehicles-per-hour. Any roofing disruption that forces a production line standdown creates a calculable financial loss - typically measured in tens of thousands of dollars per hour of lost production. Roofing projects on active manufacturing buildings have to be planned so that production never stops because of what is happening on the roof.

This means sectioned tear-off with same-day dry-in, production scheduling that avoids work directly above active line segments during their operating windows, and a pre-construction plan that identifies every area of the building where a temporary roof opening - however brief - creates a contamination or operational risk. In paint booth environments, even minor dust infiltration from tear-off activities can create rejects in the paint process. In food manufacturing environments, temporary envelope openings may trigger product hold requirements. We identify these zones in the pre-construction walkthrough and design the production sequence around them.

Manufacturing buildings also tend to have complex rooftop mechanical inventories - process exhaust fans, industrial Flashing and membrane installation around these penetrations requires custom fabricated details rather than standard manufacturer-supplied prefabricated flashings.