Team Fishel Gets the Job Done for Anthem in Kentucky

Headquartered in Indianapolis, Wellpoint, Inc. is one of the major providers of Blue Cross and Blue Shield health plans, and our nation’s largest publicly traded insurer. Over the past few years, Team Fishel has built a strong, long-term relationship with Wellpoint, which operates as Anthem in the state of Kentucky.

In April, Team Fishel was awarded a $1.3 million contract to provide voice, data and video cabling systems for Anthem’s new building at 13550 Triton Park Boulevard in Louisville. This new 4-story office building will consolidate all of the Louisville Wellpoint/Anthem associates into one location. An identical office building was constructed last year in Mason, Ohio.

Team Fishel provided and certified a complete Systimax Solution with a 20-year warranty in the 240,000 square foot facility. A total of 9,345 Plenum Category-6 cables were terminated throughout the building and fed into 1,260 cubicles.

“One of the challenges in a new construction environment is coordinating with the other trades,” said Christa Druin, Louisville Division Manager. “We adjusted our crews to work three different shifts and provided most of the labor-intensive cable installation at night when other contractors left the building.”

Lead Technician Larry Noort supervised approximately 16-20 Teammates daily who were working six to seven days per week.
 
Under a separate contract, Louisville’s construction Teammates placed fiber optic cable for the building entrances and installed the main electric feeds for Louisville Gas & Electric.

Along with the horizontal cabling, Team Fishel installed the fiber backbone cabling with a 300-pair cable connected to eight different IDF closets. Overall, Fishel Teammates installed 1,869,000 feet of Category-6 cable and terminated 576 fiber and over 4,800 copper pairs throughout the building.

What first seemed like a straightforward job quickly turned into a challenge - one that Team Fishel was ready for, according to Wellpoint IT Project Sponsor Eric Brown.

“At the onset of this project, everything appeared fairly simple: timeline, effort required, management, completion dates, et cetera,” said Brown. “As time quickly passed, the scale of the project became more glaring and its schedule greatly condensed.”

“Team Fishel, through outstanding cooperation and monstrous effort, performed all tasks on schedule as originally outlined with exponential results,” continued Brown. “Team Fishel proved to be the MVP amongst all project contractors assigned to building construction and project completion.”

The project was completed in September 2005 and is one of the largest cabling projects to date for our Louisville Teammates.