Working from drawings: cutting, fitting, and welding members to spec, shop drawings where the project needs them, AWS D1.1 procedures on load-bearing work, engineer involvement where the load path demands it, then delivery and erection or installation. Documentation follows the work.
More detail
Structural fabrication is drawing-driven work, and the drawings are what separate it from ornamental metalwork. The scope typically runs: shop drawings produced or reviewed against the design (member sizes, connection details, hole patterns, welds specified by type and size), material bought to the specified grade rather than whatever the rack holds, members cut, coped, drilled, and fit, and welds made to AWS D1.1, the structural welding code that governs procedure, fit-up, and workmanship on load-bearing steel. Where the steel carries a building or a person (beams and columns, mezzanines, stair stringers and landings, equipment platforms, canopy frames), a licensed engineer sits in the loop: sometimes stamping the design, sometimes specifying the connection detail, always the authority on what the load path requires, which in Texas runs under TBPELS rules. Fabrication happens in the shop where fixturing and position make quality repeatable, finish (primer, paint, or galvanizing sent out) follows, and the field phase sets and erects: anchor bolts or embeds coordinated in advance, members set, field connections bolted or welded per the drawings. What you hold at the end is the steel and its paper: the drawings as built, the material grade, and on engineered work the design documentation, which is what a city inspector, a future buyer, or an insurance adjuster will ask to see. Quotes price from the drawings when they exist and produce them first when they do not.