[Lawn Lad]

I purchased a new building and we hope to all moved in by April 1 for the start of the landscape season. The building is about 5,000 sq ft with 3500 sq ft of warehouse/shop space.

I'm looking for thoughts/ideas on what should be included or how you guys have set things up in your shops. This will be a first time for us in a combined/consolidated location. In the past we've had stuff here and there from my house, to my rental house to rented space.

There are three garage bays, two at about 600 sq ft (one measuring 40 x 15 and one 19 x 34) and the large one is about 2300 sq ft (65 x 35). Each of the three bays has a 12' over head door. The 40 x 15 one we'll make into a wash bay for winter work (wash salt/plow trucks) and for parking trucks during summer/winter. The other 600 sq ft garage (19 x 34) bay has a beam with 3 ton winch/come along. I think we'll make this into the shop bay for maintenance on trucks/equipment. This leaves the larger 65 x 35 garage relatively open.

We've thought about building at one end of the garage a "second floor" loft giving us storage on two levels. We've also thought about adding a production office in the shop area to keep mud/foot traffic contained to the shop so it's not going into the carpeted office areas so much. For now we're thinking about skid racks/shelving along the walls - have 14' ceilings.

We need areas to store gas cans, pesticides, landscape equipment and tools, and snow equipment. We'll have some outdoor storage but I want to limit inventory. I'm thinking about buying a 20 cy dumpster for landscape debris which we'll then pay to have dumped on our account at the local green recycler. In the yard I might inventory some mulch and topsoil and bagged product, but I'm not planning on a full stock yard at this point. If I can buy more land we might have a plant storage area.

But thinking about indoors - what are some ways that you guys have set things up or would do if you had the option to redo it over again? Do you separate maintenance from construction crew equipment? How do you or do you need to limit access to certain areas of the shop with tool cages, etc.? It's a little overwhelming to think of the space we'll have (which will get used up all to quickly) and that everything will now be in once place. Buying new shelving, cabinets, etc. will help, but I'm not sure how to store everything we have. Fortunately HGR Industrial is around the corner and they sell recycled/used industrial gear so getting some shelving and other things at a decent price should be relatively easy.

I'd welcome any thoughts, suggestions, ideas, pictures you guys might have.

Thanks,
Doug

[prapoza]

The more you think about the design and flow of the space ahead of time the better. Also get some of your production people in on it. They may have good, simple solutions to some of the organizing plus it helps get them involved. If you think "A place for everything and everything in its place" that will help. We modify every winter, tweak it to find a little better way. We have two doors and 2200 s.f. Here is a link to a great article on the subject:
http://www.lawnandlandscape.com/news/news.asp?ID=4156
Congratulations and good luck!
________
Paul

[Stonehenge]

LawnLad - Good to see you around. Lemme give this a little thought...

[Lawn Lad]

Thanks Prapoza for the link to the article. I'll be printing it out and sharing it with the guys on Monday morning when they'll see the shop for the first time.

My biggest fear is being cluttered and not organized. Given the amount of space I don't want to waste it. Having 14' ceilings gives us a lot of vertical room, which is good for the large, palletized stuff (e.g. plows in the summer, or summer equipment during the winter, etc.). But it's the small stuff that worries me a bit. Finding a home for everything is essential and maintaining a discipline of putting things away the first time is essential. If everyone knows where stuff goes its easy to put it away.

I hate having things on the floor. To me it's cluttered and sloppy. I like to be able to sweep and hose the floor down regularly in our smaller garages.

I think having the shop/mechanics area set aside from everything else will be helpful. I was down at the shop tonight trying to sort out how we'll organize the office and where we'll put things. Trying to figure out who has access to what and how we're going to key the building and so forth. Much to think about and wrap my mind around. I realize that doing it "right" the first time and having as much figured out ahead of time is important to cutting down on redoing things needlessly, but I also recognize that we can't sort everything out in advance either and there will be some redoing.

[prapoza]

As you know, there is no such thing as perfection. Especially with spring only days away. We labeled and made specific places for all the hand tools, chain saws, hedge trimmers, blowers, gas cans, etc...I think shadowing things is a good idea too, its bilingual. We've done that with some of our small tools that are hung on the wall. For now I'd suggest putting a plan together and getting it done. We're too close to spring to be screwing around with a comprehensive master plan. See how it goes this season and don't be afraid to "do over" next winter. I think that article is great. We're gonna outline areas for our aerator, slice seeder, vib. compactor, cement mixer and trailers with tape or paint in the very near future.
_________
Paul

[Lawn Lad]

Well, not quite three months later and we're moved in and getting things into their place. The major stuff is up and in its place but we're still working out the details on the little stuff and where it should go.

Here is a picture of our hand tools that aren't already in trucks. we started by putting up the power strut and then we added the 2.0' shelves above. The tires were just thrown up there to get them off the floor, we'll move those into the future mechanics area sometime later. The shelves above the tools will be for things we don't use that often or our extra stock on supplies, such as rakes, gas gans, tarps, etc.

[Lawn Lad]

Here is a close up of the hanging method we're using. Power strut with anchor bolts of varying lenghts to accomodate the various types of tools. Longer ones for lighter tools like rakes, and shorter ones for heavier tools like sledges and mauls. We can fit four or five shovels on a 12" anchor bolt. We use 16" for leaf rakes and 8 or 10" for the heavy stuff. With 40' of strut (two 20' long runs) we can slide and move the bolts to accomodate the tools.

We still don't have a good way to store loppers, pruners, weeding knives, etc. We need to find an efficient and appropriate space for garden hoses, chains/turnbuckels/straps, soil probes, and the such.

I thought about some sort of bins for the pruners, weeding knives, soil probes, etc. We've got another shelf set up for debris bags, active gas cans, tarps (plastic and bulldog), etc. I could build in some sort of intermediate shelving on the pallet racking that would accomodate the smaller stuff that we use regularly. The idea being that we keep all like toos in one area that is easy to access and account for everything.

I'd still be very interested in seeing how other people are storing their tools and equipment. What has worked and what hasn't?

[sleepy]

How many employees do you have? Thats huge.

[GLAN]

All I am thinking of is


Jealous and envy

[Fine Edge]

I want a big shop too.

[cutntrim]

Well, I like to have all our hand tools on the trailers so we don't have to move them twice (on/off) each day. As it is, we usually trip all over each other anyway in a mad scramble to get out of the yard each a.m. It'd be easier with a large shop like you now have, compared to three 10'x20' rental garage units.

[Lawn Lad]

Because we're a small company we share many of the tools. The only really dedicated crew on any given day is the maintenance crew and they do carry their own set of tools. Otherwise all the other equipment is essentially "pool" equipment. At one point we had three consistent crews each day and we tried color coding the tools so they stayed with the crews, but it hasn't been a problem in the last several years. I like open trailers for now because if something goes bang it's easy and inexpensive to fix. I see all too many enclosed trailers that are beat up.

We might be in the market for an enclosed trailer for installations, in the hope of finding a full time foreman to run the crew. At this time we're short that foreman and therefore limit the installations. One of our dumps has tool boxes and having a set of tools on the truck is very nice. Our other dump is bed only and you have to load up for each job, not as efficient.

[NCSULandscaper]

is that an air compressor suspended from the ceiling?

[Lawn Lad]

Yes. We're still working out the kinks with it. It gets it up off the floor but there is still some jiggle that is getting transferred to the roof. We ran air drops through the shop at various points. But we're still using our little floor compressor since we don't have all the problems worked out with the big one.

We put some rubber isolators between the feet of the compressor and the cross beams that are attached to the threaded rod. With too much shake and wiggle, so we then braced it against the wall. It still shakes so I got some spring isolators, which we haven't installed yet. We also have to check to see if the belts are out of alignment and causing the compressor to shake when running. The compressor was in the shop when we bought it so we're working our way backwards removing the problems as we go. I'm hoping we don't discover that the motor is out of alignment. We'll know once we remove the belts.

[Lawn Lad]

We're refining our storage and setting things up differently. I've mentioned in other posts that I recently read the PLANET Crystal Ball Report (CBR) on Lean Management. The concept of 5 S'ing our facility made a lot of things make sense.

5 S stands for: Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, Sustain.

We've divvied up the shop into areas and used the criteria described in the CBR to help us think more critically about our work space. One of the primary goals of lean management is to reduce waste. According to lean management principals the majority of waste or non-value added steps come not when you create your part, product or service, but in the steps leading up the moment you create actual value for your customer. Everything in our shop has the potential to distract us from the primary objective of serving our customer. If it doesn't add value, why do we have it? Why do we do it?

If we're supposed to ask why we do something, ask yourself five times why? Eventually you get to a better answer. We've been challenging each other every day on why things get done a certain way. It has caused us to come up with some really good solutions to what might be mundane things. But all of it results in a more efficient operation.

I'm still curious to see what others have done in their shops to be more organized and how they solved particular problems. I'm always looking for ideas.

One thing that I realize is that you have to be willing to spend time creating and building the hard systems of your business. Just buying shelves isn't enough, you've got to spend time sorting and standardizing, labeling and organizing for the systems to work. We're spending time building things in our shop to make things in the future more efficient. It's taking time, but in the long run it makes more sense.

It's the little things, here is one example. We set up an area for our truck washing equipment. We developed an SOP and check list for washing the trucks. We defined what an "A" wash, "B" wash and "C" wash consist of. Now we can tell Jr. to do a "C" wash.

On the wash shelf located near the bathroom, you'll find a shelf with the bottles of cleaners, etc, a shelf with the specific 5 gal buckets for washing, we hung the scrub brushes (Red handle for beds (not to be used on clear cote finishes) and Blue handles for cabs and clear cote). We bought pumps for the soap so that rather than telling someone to pour some soap in the bucket, four gallons of warm water gets four pumps of soap. Not too much, not too little. Avoid waste.

We've begun timing how long it takes us to wash trucks. Right now we're just gathering information. But we're measuring the process so that by spring time, we can say it takes us 18 minutes to do XYZ. We can then continue to refine the process, our organization, to get it down to 14 minutes, etc.

We've done the same thing with our vehicle fluids check with a check list. Define the process, measure it and look for improvements. I've attached the spread sheet we use for this check list. It now gives us accountability that we didn't have before.

How have others applied these principals in your own business? Anyone have any check lists they use in their own business/shop they can share?