Working in the glass and glazing industry, I’ve had the experience of working at both large and small companies. When I worked at Cobbledick Kibbe, it was a large company with lots of small branches. We had contract branches and retail branches along with a wholesale division. Midwest Plate Glass and C/S Erectors were both smaller companies with that “family” feel. One office, one shop, very personal. Here at Walters & Wolf, we are actually 5 different companies. We have the Glass Company, the Precast Company and the Interiors Company all based out of Fremont, CA. We have Walters & Wolf Curtainwall in Washington and Walters & Wolf Construction Specialties in Arizona. All of the companies are separate profit centers. In addition, Walters & Wolf Glass has three branches, one in LA and one in Las Vegas.
One huge advantage of being in a larger company is the amount of resources you have to draw on. There are just more people and all of them come with their own experiences and backgrounds. At Walters & Wolf, there is another interesting advantage. Since all the companies are separate profit centers, we all do things a little differently. This enables us to go and visit another branch and see what innovative things they have adopted and we might be able to use.
For example, the three branches in Fremont, Seattle and Arizona all build custom curtain wall systems. We brought our design groups together a year ago to look at the different systems we were designing and learn from each other. The outcome of these meetings was a curtain wall system that we built based on the best things we saw in all three branches. We have our first projects with this system rolling through the shop currently so we are meeting again next week to review how things are going and see if we can improve the system further.
We also have the ability to do some pretty diverse things. We partner with our precast company quite often. This has enabled us to do things like create a large column to column precast panel and pre-install all the windows in it right in our yard. We can then close in the customer’s building in a matter of weeks with very little effort. We also have a project going right now where we are mounting the GFRC panels to our curtain wall system. Again, less job site presence for our customer and a faster installation with all the products pre-fabricated and tested before installation.
Drawing on the expertise within the company leads to lots of great innovations. Our precast group always has great insights into mounting options for stone jobs or how to build and transport truss frames. We’ve used these ideas on several projects where we built composite panel walls on truss frames and just mounted them on the building. We’ve also done several projects with stone mounted directly in our curtain wall system.
Visits to our sister companies yield other results. We get to see how they are fabricating, assembling and installing their curtain wall units. The Seattle group has some very innovative racks for transporting units. Arizona has been working on a way to transport units on their side to save on trucking. Seattle’s field crew had come up with an innovative way to clamp their units and a very different type of floor anchor. Arizona had a great way to hoist and set their units that we adopted recently. It is like being able to visit your competitor and learn all their secrets!
I’m looking forward to our collaboration next week on the system design. We have people flying in from Arizona, Los Angeles, and Seattle. We have three different types of projects going right now in both of our shops so there is lots of things to see to help us with our design decisions. This type of continuous improvement has a huge impact on the company. Improving our products is at the heart of lean thinking!
