Fifty Panels
When RNGD built its own headquarters, the fabrication team dimensioned every exterior wall panel by hand, the way the company always had. Months later, Busra Yucel ran the same building through a tool she built at her desk: an optimizer that reads a wall’s dimensions straight out of the model and works out the most efficient way to cut it into panels. Same building, same walls. Fifty fewer panels than what the crew had actually built.
That’s the whole story in one number. A script written by one analyst is now shaping how RNGD frames its buildings.
Busra started out in civil engineering in Istanbul, drawn in by the idea of building bridges and big things from nothing. Her first job after graduation put her on an actual job site, and the work was slow, manual, and stuck in old habits. That gap between what construction could be and what it actually was followed her into a PhD in building construction at Auburn University, where she researched how construction companies decide to adopt new technology.
“Most products out there don’t actually solve your problem,” she said. “Sometimes you have to build it yourself.”
That research is what led her to Will, then an internship, then a job offer to move to New Orleans and join RNGD full time.
Not long after she started, Julia and Will brought her a real problem: the design team’s process for laying out exterior wall panels was slow and entirely manual. Could she help?
A Game of Tetris
It was, to Busra, a familiar kind of puzzle. In a systems engineering course years earlier, she had learned optimization models: an objective, a set of real constraints, a search for the best answer inside them. Paneling a wall was exactly that.
“I love playing Tetris,” she said. “It’s like playing Tetris with the panels and the walls.”
Before her tool existed, here is what the process looked like. Julia’s team worked one wall at a time, sizing each panel by hand and checking it against every fabrication rule they had learned over years on the job, then adjusting the next panel to match. It took real skill to get right. It also took hours, because that same careful math had to be redone for every wall, on every project, with nothing to carry the logic from one wall to the next.
Busra spent her internship learning that process from the inside, failing her way through early versions and going back to Julia again and again with questions.
“It was a lot of learning from my failures,” she said. “I’d show Julia something I thought was great, and she’d tell me, we can’t track this, this length is too much.”
Slowly, those answers became rules a computer could use: a wall’s dimensions and openings pulled straight from RNGD’s 3D Revit model, a hard ceiling on panel length because nothing longer than 29 feet can go on a truck, a preference for reusing identical or mirrored panels instead of cutting something new for every gap.
Three Hours to Three Seconds
She wrote it as a script and dropped it into Revit as a button. Click it, and a process that used to take three hours now takes three seconds. Unlike a black box, every decision behind that button gets saved, and if someone adjusts a panel by hand afterward, the system remembers that too, so the tool gets smarter with every project instead of starting over each time.
“I wanted to design it in a way that keeps the human in the loop,” she said. “You can always see what’s happening.”
Beyond Wall Panels
Word of the tool spread fast. The fabrication crew saw what it could do and asked the obvious follow up question: could it help with trucking, too?
Busra walked out to the shop and found Trayton. What are the rules when you ship this? What’s your inventory? What’s your capacity? What permits do you need?
She built the answers into a second tool, one that takes a finished list of panels and calculates how many trucks a project needs, how to stack them, and what it costs to use RNGD’s own trucks versus renting.
Trayton Tully has seen what that early information changes on the ground.
“Expediting wall optimization early in the project allows for more accurate estimating and provides additional time to plan project logistics,” he said. “This creates a positive domino effect from project start through completion, resulting in faster coordination, improved efficiency, and ultimately, a better quality product.”
The results kept stacking up. On a recent project, New Lab, the optimizer needed two fewer trucks than what the crew had used by hand, three total instead of four, saving a rental truck outright.
Harrison, an intern on the team, used to spend entire days building tracking documents from scratch, redoing them every time something changed upstream. After trying Busra’s tool, his reaction was immediate: this is much better, he told her. Way faster.
Robert Lambert has watched that same tool reshape how the team plans shipments.
“Our internally developed trucking optimization software transforms the way we plan and manage panel shipments by rapidly analyzing panel configurations, trailer capacity, and required loads,” he said. “By reducing the time needed to evaluate and reorganize shipments, the tool enables faster decision-making, maximizes trailer utilization, and creates greater flexibility to respond to changing production and shipping requirements.”
None of it happened in isolation. Getting the tool in front of more people meant sitting down with Chad and the IT team on hosting and building out the tool, so it could eventually reach more of the company instead of just running on Busra’s laptop. It meant weekly check ins with Stevie, in production, to hear what still breaks and what still needs fixing.
What’s Next
Busra is already looking past wall panels. She wants an in house design capability that plugs into the optimizer from the very start of a project, and enough project data saved up that the tool starts learning RNGD’s own preferences instead of relying on generic math. She also sees it changing how early conversations with clients go.
“From the first meeting, you can tell them the number of panels, the number of trucks, the installation day,” she said. “If we have ten or twenty projects in the future, we can go back and fix the code, because we’ll know what’s actually preferred.”
Tramel Smith sees that same logic extending well past exterior walls.
“I’m excited about the potential to apply this same optimization approach to structural steel and MEP assemblies,” he said. “The greatest value lies in leveraging tools like this to drive efficiency throughout the entire construction process, from estimating and design to material optimization, fabrication, sequencing, transportation, and installation.”
Will Cotten, who first brought Busra into the fold at RNGD, sees where it’s headed next.
“Busra’s tech now extends across our core fabrication capabilities, including steel structures and prefabricated wall analysis, with MEP systems soon to follow,” he said. “With the addition of trucking and logistics optimization, we can, in a matter of seconds, evaluate early-stage concept drawings to generate estimates that closely align with actual quantities and fabrication and shipping costs. This capability enhances client understanding of our RDM approach and provides greater confidence in project planning and decision-making.”
She still calls it a game of Tetris. The only difference now is that the pieces move at the speed she always wanted them to.
