The Weitz Company • 763-694-7940 • www.weitz.com
Reprinted from Grain Journal November/December 2016 Issue
Given the complexity of construction projects in the grain industry today, coordinating various teams and subcontractors to ensure a facility is built on time, within budget, and to the highest standards is a daunting task to say the least. However, as The Weitz Company has demonstrated for more than 160 years since its inception, there is a better way to build.
The Weitz Company descends from a small carpentry shop founded in 1855 in Des Moines, IA by Charles H. Weitz, an entrepreneurial immigrant from Germany. Weitz immigrated to the United States in 1850 after serving his apprenticeship to the carpenters’ trades in his native Germany. He practiced his trade for five years in Ohio, and then at the age of 28, Weitz journeyed to Fort Des Moines where he heard the capital of Iowa would be moved and believed opportunity would come to a man of energy.
Weitz’s first job was putting windows in the basement of the old Savery House. He then won his first contract to build a drugstore on Second Street. Within a few months, seven men (now 1,200 employees) were working for him. In December 1855, he opened a shop at 119 Third Street under the name, “Chas Weitz, Carpenter and Builder,” and thus founded the forerunner of what is believed to be the oldest construction firm west of the Mississippi River.
Weitz’ industrial division offers a different perspective to project development, taking a complete design-build approach rather than just one piece of it. The Weitz industrial team serves as a single-source, multi-discipline, integrated design engineering and construction operations group serving the grain and milling industries.
Unlike some design-build teams that may want to just get in and get out – especially when problems arise – the Weitz team takes pride in the fact that its employees are all rowing together toward a common goal, no matter the approach.
“A differentiator with Weitz industrial division is having in-house design engineers and architects – being part of the same team pulling in the same direction, designing with construction in mind and designing with safety in mind, versus potentially just getting the design on paper and out the door as fast as possible,” explains Alex Westlind, PE, engineering manager at Weitz.
“Having design and construction under one umbrella provides potential for rapid completion and an efficient facility,” he notes.
“Weitz embraces the use of technology and lean construction in our total project approach with commitment to outstanding value and quality,” according to Eric Sill, agriculture market sector leader at Weitz.
Success Through Integration
The company’s unique process is formally known as the 360° Facility Life Cycle™, which addresses clients’ needs as individual services or as a fully-integrated solution. Whether facing routine maintenance, a capital expenditure, new construction or expansion, Weitz can deliver the right services for one or multiple stages, or continuously from one stage of a plant’s life cycle to the next (see Figure 1).
“The life cycle we’ve created is unique because it gives our clients the ability to begin and end at any step,” explains Gerry Leukam, vice president of industrial design services at Weitz. “If your project only needs maintenance work, you can start and stop at the ‘Maintain’ step. If you’re needing an expansion you can start and stop at the ‘Grow’ step. However, if your project requires additional work, our teams are fully capable of providing all eight steps worth of design work, estimating, construction, commissioning, startup and maintenance, all starting at ‘Conceptualize.’
In order for the life cycle to work as designed, employees must be empowered to make decisions throughout every step of the process and take action to benefit the customer.
“The customer first mentality is that everyone on the project team is empowered to make decisions,” explains Sill. “In the end, we want customers to know we are beyond a service provider, but a trusted partner. That’s the ultimate goal. Everyone on the project team is empowered to build trusting relationships and make informed decisions that benefits the customer,” he says.
‘All-In’ for Safety
Weitz safety commitment focuses on their best resource: people. It aims to make safety the shared value of every employee
by putting safety behind every strategy, decision, operation, and action. The “All-In” philosophy is ever-striving to make the well-being of Weitz employees and all other workers on job sites a top priority. Weitz adopted the Behavior Based Safety (BBS) standard for approaching sits safety performance and attitude. For every project, Weitz employees are trained and BBS audits are performed.
“Our safety program is employee focused,” explains Norm Sunderman, safety manager. “We commit to make sure everyone on the job site gets home safely to their families. We conduct regular safety training and host safety meetings to plan how we will safely complete each scope of work including project tasks, mitigate hazards, and even equipment selection,” he says.
To ensure safety compliance, Weitz performs Job Site Analysis (JSA) and and W.H.A.T. Pre-Task Planning on every project and utilizes safety application for inspection checklists.
“Just like we have given our folks the ability to try and be the biggest customer advocate that they can, we also give them the ability to stop work whenever they see an issue. Everyone of our employees carries around a Stop Work Authority card. If they feel that there is a safety concern they have the right and responsibility to stop any unsafe work activity,” Sunderman says.
Case in point: At a meeting in Des Moines during which an outside consultant grabbed a swivel chair to hang up a Post-It easel pad sheet on a wall only six to eight feet high, Leukam observed what was about to transpire and handed the man a stop work card.
“He looked at me and I said, ‘I’ll go get you a ladder,’” Leukam recalls.
Although some might consider the action extreme, Leukam says, “the point was to send a message that every action needs to fall in line with proper safety protocol, no matter what, when or where.”
Putting the ‘We’ in Weitz
At the end of the day, what makes The Weitz Company so successful is the dedicated people that work together as a team – or as some think of it, as an extended family.
“I think a lot of us look at each other within the company as family,” says Westlind. “We spend more time together during the day than some of us do with our families at home. It’s truly a second family – for some the first family. We find that especially true with our on-site staff. They treat safety as if they’re out there looking after family members, not just co-workers. Ensuring everyone gets home to their families in the same condition they walked onto the site in. It’s incredibly powerful” he adds.
Leukam relates a story about one designer in the Weitz Minneapolis office who recently explained, there is no “I” or “they” on any project we work. It’s just “we,” and no single individual or group can succeed on its own merits. “Weitz has ‘We’ in our name. We are a combined team working together to continue the longevity of Charles Weitz and its principles for which this company stands upon,” Leukam says.
