Cultured Marble Countertop Manufacturer
A cultured marble countertop company was going to be building a new 120,000 ft² facility on some land that they had acquired in Utah and wanted to put the manufacturing compliment in their new building. This particular process was very smelly and they didn’t want customers going into their manufacturing plant because it genuinely smelled bad. So, they were going to be put a show room in a different building, adjacent to and separate from their manufacturing plant.
After Mr. Ward was retained to do the plant layout & design, they went to Southern California to see an equipment manufacturer for the cultured marble countertop industry. Together, they toured that supplier’s facility before they went to look at a production plant where one of their customers produced cultured marble countertops for the Southern California market to see their equipment in operation.
Within two weeks Mr. Ward had not only designed the flow in his client’s building, but in collaboration with the structural engineer, he had changed the shape of the building so that he could fit the entire production plant into 60,000 ft² instead of 120,000 ft².
In connection with changing the shape of the building for flow purposes, Mr. Ward changed the location and orientation of the building on the lot for safety purposes. Not only did he get more parking, but he separated the traffic of semi trucks bringing raw materials to the front of the building from the traffic of the much smaller installation contractor’s pickup trucks which flowed around to the back of the building to get product for installation in customer homes.
The rest of the 120,000 ft.² was designated for high-volume finished goods inventory and for staging specific outbound orders to either new construction or remodeling clients that could then be loaded quickly on installation trucks and secured at the installation sites.
Unfortunately, before the building was built, the former owner sued the new owners for control of the company because the former owner had just finished his divorce and was not going to have to give a significant portion of the company to his ex-wife in the settlement. (Unbeknownst to the new owners, he had effectively passed majority ownership to the new owners, apparently intending to sue them for ownership after his divorce was final. It was a very nasty breakup… probably for both the marriage as well as the company. Both the marriage & the design went bye-bye. Ouch!