The various bridge sections were pre-fabricated from individual steel plates in their factory at Lauterbourg, France (near Strassburg).

With a height of 345 m, it is 20 m higher than the Eiffel Tower. Despite its length of 2.460 m and 36.000 tonnes of steel incorporated in it, the bridge was completed in a record time of only 3 years by the company Eiffel.

Important criteria for the success of the total project were:

• High fabrication speeds
• Tolerance for the weld seams (bevel and X weld preparation cuts) less than 1 mm. (This was the prerequisite to be able to fabricate the individual parts into sections using welding robots without any problems,.)
• Permanent marking of the individual components with alpha-numerical information about the part number, position where it was to be used etc.

These requirements could all be met with the use of a cutting machine OmniMat L specially designed by the company Messer Cutting Systems, Groß-Umstadt, for this application and equipped with a 400 A Oxygen plasma unit and a needle marking system. An integrated X Y coordinate slide incorporated into the machine enabled the initially specified marking speed to be exceeded by a factor of 4.

A postprocessor developed by Messer Cutting Systems converted the geometry data coming from a CAD system completely automatically into the technologically correct CNC data needed to perform the weld preparations.

A CNC integrated compensation software automatically corrected for the plate expansion due to temperature for a reference temperature of 15 °C. This ensured that the cut parts for the section were all of the same size regardless of whether they were cut at-5°C in Winter or at +30°C in summer.