Wolfspeed Silicon Carbide Facility Lean Coaching
Wolfspeed Silicon Carbide Facility
Building the World's Largest Silicon Carbide Facility, One Team at a Time
CONTEXT & SCALE
From Concept to Campus
Responding to surging global demand for silicon carbide, a semiconductor that makes electric vehicles more efficient, Wolfspeed followed an earlier manufacturing facility in New York State with a far larger undertaking in Siler City, North Carolina: the John Palmour Manufacturing Center for Silicon Carbide, known internally as Project SCF. The idea started as a napkin sketch in 2021. Within a year, the major players had convened to kick off construction.
Delivered under a single Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) contract binding Wolfspeed, designer WSP, construction manager Whiting-Turner, and ten major trade partners, it became one of the largest IPD projects ever attempted in the manufacturing sector, ultimately enclosing more than 2.2 million square feet of process building and 1 million square feet of central utility space, with over 300,000 square feet of clean room built to exacting contamination-control standards.
THE CHALLENGE
Inventing the Process While Building the Plant
Wolfspeed needed to deliver a tenfold increase in production capacity on an aggressive schedule and budget, all while its own manufacturing process was still being refined in real time. Complicating matters further, this was Wolfspeed's first true IPD megaproject. Of the thirteen signatories to the IPD contract, few had direct experience performing on a project of this scale under a shared-risk model. Getting dozens of project leaders from different companies to align quickly and stay aligned was as much a challenge as the construction itself.
COACHING THE CORE GROUP
Leadership as Infrastructure
BA Science was engaged to help the project's Core Group, the leadership body responsible for resolving technical issues and steering overall project decisions, function as a genuine team rather than a collection of separate contracting parties. BA Science’s team recognized early that common lean and IPD tools alone wouldn't be enough; building the trust and willingness to collaborate that dozens of leaders would need, especially under pressure, required a servant-leadership approach applied daily. Boulder coached the Core Group through every contract milestone using trust and relationship-building, decision-point planning, facilitation of both large and small meetings, milestone planning, and a discipline of reliable promising to build accountability across the team.
The coaching paid off directly. Under BA Science’s guidance, the Core Group negotiated and signed its IPD contract, completed Validation, and executed an EMP Amendment, all while simultaneously developing program and design and enclosing more than 2 million square feet of construction in just 13 months. Perhaps the more lasting result was cultural. The Core Group grew from a group of IPD beginners into a highly productive lean team. One recommendation born from the engagement captured the lesson plainly: Develop trusting relationships early on through in-person meetings, since COVID-driven shifts to virtual work made that harder to do later.
BUILDING THE EDUCATION PROGRAM
A New Way of Working
Because Wolfspeed's prior IPD experience had never extended to a project this large, BA also built and ran the education program that made shared practice possible across thirteen contracting organizations. The first Big Room meeting, held in June 2022, introduced all participants to IPD fundamentals. From there, Boulder tailored distinct sessions to different audiences: a strategic overview for leadership and executives, deep and repeated training for the Core Group, a legal-team session bridging the gap between IPD Risk Pool structures and more familiar EPCM or Design/Build methodologies, ongoing reinforcement for the broader project team, and an onboarding package that folded lean orientation into every new employee's site orientation.
Throughout the project, tools like target value delivery, reliable commitments, and the Last Planner System were reintroduced in leadership meetings as touchstones whenever BA Science observed a gap between practice and behavior in the field.
EXECUTION AT SCALE
Collaboration Across Trades and Teams
The construction itself matched the ambition of the delivery model. D.H. Griffin's teams blasted and repurposed nearly 2 million tons of rock to prepare the site. SC Steel fabricated 27,000 tons of structural steel. Wayne Brothers poured almost 100,000 cubic yards of concrete from an on-site batch plant. The project topped out in March 2024, after which Dynamic Systems, Batchelor & Kimball, Starr Electric, Ace Electric, Shambaugh & Son, and RoviSys layered in piping, high- and low-voltage power, fire protection, and building controls across the site, all coordinated through a shared BIM model that let every trade design against the same conflict-free plan.
RESULTS & LESSONS LEARNED
What the Team Left Behind
At peak, the project put more than $100 million of work in place monthly, employed 2,800 workers a day, and drew roughly 8,000 team members from 33 states across a combined 7.3 million labor hours. From the initial napkin sketch in 2021 to its final completion in December 2025, Project SCF stands as proof that IPD can scale to megaproject size when the human side of the model gets as much deliberate investment as the schedule and the steel.
