Performing optimization of structures is always of great interest. There are several different ways to optimize steel structures. Today, several companies are having difficulties with their cable drums during transport. Cable drums with full cable load become heavy and make it difficult to transport. This paper aims to examine existing published research and approaches, with a focus on steel optimization. This paper has two research objectives, the first one is to examine the possibilities for optimizing cable drums in terms of mass without compromising load capacity or yield stress. The second question is to determine how much of the weight/mass of cable drums may be reduced via optimization. To optimize it, measurements, cable drum modeling, research studies, and connecting suitable software's will be carried out in this paper. Participation Action Research and Reverse Engineering methodologies were implemented in combination. A literature review was performed to get a deeper understanding of the methods. A systematic literature review was done to identify available approaches and techniques for structural steel optimization. In order to optimize the cable drum, Excel and Autodesk Inventor were connected through Visual Basic Applications (VBA). The optimization process workflow acted with a server and two clients, where Excel acted as the server and Autodesk Inventor and MATLAB acted as clients. It was found that this was a suitable method for optimizing the cable drum were to work with an optimization process that included connecting a server with clients. The MATLAB function fmincon was applied with both interior-point algorithm and Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP). The optimal design variables for the cable drum were established, and the objective minimization was accomplished by reducing the cable drum mass of 2495.20 kg. The cable drums mass was minimized to 101.86 kg. The literature review was systematically conducted to find available approaches and methods for structural steel optimization. The combination of Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Reverse Engineering (RE) was ideal for this project since it enabled both approaches to gather data on cable drum capacity and alternative optimization strategies.The schematic optimization workflow was appropriate to apply throughout the implementation phase. The workflow gave the user complete control over the optimization process, and the automated process saved time and was simple to adapt.