With groundbreaking only weeks away, the Northern Plains Commerce Centre is beginning to take shape in the minds of the people working closest to it.

To get a better grasp on what they can expect, a small contingent from Bismarck helping develop NPCC made a trip to Columbus, Ohio, last week to tour facilities that have much in common with the Bismarck project. Brian Eiseman, Cathy Holmes and Niles Hushka, representing NPCC consultant Kadrmas, Lee and Jackon Inc., were joined by the Bismarck-Mandan Development Association's Jim Dahlen, Bobcat Manufacturing's Mark Seifert and Montana Dakota Utilities' Kevin Magstad.

Representatives of the Bismarck City Commission had intended on joining the two-day tour, but last- minute flight changes kept them home.

The first facility the group toured was the Norfolk Southern intermodal facility. The complex is set up to deal specifically with freight containers, 20- and 40-foot steel boxes, which are transported by rail and truck. The visit to Norfolk Southern gave the group an idea of what kind of equipment will be needed to handle container traffic at NPCC.

"Norfolk Southern is a true intermodal facility handling just containers," Eiseman said. "We went there to get a feel for the operation, which will be a component of NPCC."

For Dahlen, who joined BMDA just 21/2 months ago after 12 years as development director for Devils Lake, the trip was an eye-opener. Dahlen said the opportunity to work with the NPCC was one of the things that excited him about joining BMDA.

"People don't understand how complex the NPCC concept is," Dahlen said. "It's one thing to bring in rail freight, but the logistics of moving it to the right places and who does what - boy, is it ever exciting. And to have an anchor organization like Bobcat participating makes it all the more impressive."

The next stop was the Rickenbacker Industrial Park, a facility closely resembling what the NPCC is to become, but on a much larger scale.

"It's a huge complex, some 2,500 acres," Eiseman said. NPCC will have about 200 acres to develop.

"Some 13 separate industrial parks make up Rickenbacker," Dahlen said.

"It has a foreign trade zone such as NPCC is applying for, and is attached to an airport, like NPCC is. There we met with freight expediters, another possible component for NPCC."

A freight expediter, Dahlen said, assembles and collects less-than-a-container shipments. The company finds ways to combine shipments to fill containers to capacity.

"I expect we'll have many of those kinds of cases here in North Dakota, where a company isn't big enough to provide enough product to fill a container," Dahlen said. "Not everybody that's going to use NPCC will have multiple container loads, but we can come up with ways to share containers."

Foreign trade zones are of particular interest to companies that import and export. The zone allows companies to reduce, defer and even eliminate duty charges. Dahlen said the group managed to get a lot of answers to their questions on trade zones, which should help in Bismarck's application now being put together.

The Harmony Agriculture Products facility, owned by Honda, provided an example of the ag product identity preservation process that is growing in popularity. With North Dakota's top industry being agriculture, it likely will play an important part in NPCC's success.

"Harmony is a state-of-the-art non-GMO soybean processing plant that exports beans to Japan," Dahlen says.

"We expect NPCC will be shipping commodity grains, and we're seeing more and more of North Dakota's producers becoming involved in identity preservation. Identity preservation allows products to be tracked from their conception to the end customer. The Harmony plant bags, palletizes and labels the soybeans."

A visit also was made to a cross-docking facility, which has many of the same capabilities being planned for the NPCC's general warehouse being built by Montana-Dakota Utilities.

"Full semis are unloaded at a warehouse, sorted and repackaged to go out on a different truck," Eiseman said. "Bits and pieces are brought in and consolidated and then sent out to go to other facilities."

Both Eiseman and Dahlen called the visit to Columbus "a good educational trip."

"I wouldn't say we came across anything unexpected, but it was great to be able to see the process work," Eiseman said.

"To date, NPCC has just been talk and and what we've seen on paper," Dahlen said. "Through this trip, I got a chance to visualize how it will all come together and work. I walked away understanding NPCC much, much more than when I left Bismarck. The state of Ohio moves a lot of products, and Columbus is at the heart of it all."

(Reach reporter Gordon Weixel at 250-8255 or gordon.weixel@bismarcktribune.com.)