Growing a Manufacturing Plant on a Greenfield

Lean thinking overlays GAF Energy’s manufacturing plans. It’s peppered in Robinett’s language, whether he is talking about the rapid cycles of learning in lean product development, or the single- piece-flow, minimizing travel or visual management aspects of lean manufacturing.

“First and foremost, of course, is the respect for the people, respect for the process,” he adds.

And speaking of visual management, George- town’s shop-floor design provides ample evidence of its use. Everyone who supports manufacturing at the new GAF Energy factory—production super- visor, maintenance technician, process engineer— will work from the equivalent of a fishbowl on the shop floor. The glass-walled room provides line of sight to the people and processes, and its location should speed response when difficulties arise on the production floor.

“We have a very open concept,” Robinett says.

The Georgetown production-floor layout is the result of many voices and more than a dozen drafts. Employing a brainstorming exercise called 7 Ways, GAF Energy captured ideas from employees representing maintenance, process engineering, shop-floor operations and other leaders. They were tasked with sketching out their ideas for the ideal layout, given the cost and capacity goals for the site. The San Jose plant started assembling Timberline Solar only last year, so even as employees there continue to develop best practices in production, they are sharing those learnings in the new site design.

Ultimately, the focus is the user experience, Robinett says.

Not Just 'We Know Best'

“It wasn’t just, ‘Okay, we have a team that builds factories so we know better,’” he says. “It’s ‘We learn everything (we) can from the people who actually have to operate, who have been learning and struggling with … either the mistakes we made or things we didn’t know or the changes that we made over the years.’”

The overall employee experience also includes the environment outside the plant. The city of Georgetown appealed to the solar manufacturer in part because the city-owned electrical utility supports renewable energies. For employees, the site is expansive. The company preserved groves of oaks trees and installed walking trails around a small lake on the approximately 50 acres of land on which the factory sits.

The location provides a short commute for many potential workers and for those coming from Austin, a reverse commute. The new site, Robinett says, “has easy access off the highway but also a very private feel to the campus. That’s something that was really attractive.”

“It’s so important to attract and retain talent, and it’s not just about the job, it’s the environment that you work in,” he says.

Now for a glimpse into two greenfield sites going up in Wisconsin and Colorado. 

CLEAN ENERGY TECHNOLOGY IN WISCONSIN

Company: Excellerate (a division of Faith Technologies Inc.)
Location: Little Chute, Wisconsin
Product: Off-site-built electrical components
Size: 385,000 square feet

Even as GAF Energy expands into Texas, Excellerate is adding to its footprint with a 385,000-square-foot manufacturing plant on the rise in Little Chute, Wisconsin. The company, a division of Faith Technologies Inc., broke ground on the new facility in November 2022.

Excellerate occupies an interesting space in manufacturing. It produces and tests manufactured electrical components and assemblies that might otherwise largely be put together in the field. As Pat McGettigan, executive vice president, describes it, Excellerate is “industrializing construction work by taking labor offsite and building components in our controlled manufacturing facilities.” He cites increased productivity as a primary benefit.

Excellerate designed the new site to accommodate demand growth of its current products and to do so more efficiently. The company, however, also is anticipating significant demand growth for renewable energy products, including microgrids, and is growing its capacity to build those products for EnTech Solutions, a sister division focused on energy. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that smart manufacturing—or perhaps smart energy— is a significant focus of Excellerate’s new plant.

McGettigan outlines three examples of how it’s being incorporated:

• Smart breakers: “We monitor the power, we can track the power and we can set it up to be optimized to make sure we’re being as efficient as possible with energy us- age,” the executive vice president explains.
• Net zero: Excellerate is equipping the Little Chute facility to achieve net-zero status, although not immediately. “Our goal is to offset and ulti- mately to completely be able to come off the grid and run that whole fa- cility with renewable energy. Part of that may be wind, part of that may be solar or that may be from an alternative renewable energy source,” McGettigan says. “The electrical equipment we’re going to have inside that facility has to be able to adapt to that, so we did have to do a lot of thinking … on the front end to make sure we could do that.”
• Smart data: Where to innovate and where to automate requires having a good grasp of metrics. Getting a better handle of that data at the new site is part of the plan, McGettigan says. “How are we producing the products? How efficient is our manufacturing? We want to be able to capture as much data as possible with everything that we’re doing in that facility to drive innovation, also to drive productivity.”

Excellerate is taking a page from its own “industrializing construction” philosophy to accelerate the timeline at its Little Chute site. For example, two electrical rooms for the new plant will be built offsite and brought in, and to the degree possible, the electrical work will be completed offsite as subassemblies and then delivered to the site.

Similar to GAF Energy’s new manufacturing site, Excellerate’s new plant is scheduled for completion in the fall of 2023.

THERAPEUTICS IN COLORADO

Company: Agilent Technologies Inc.
Location: Frederick, Colorado
Product: Therapeutic oligonucleotides (oligos)
Size: 198,000 square feet

Our third example comes from Frederick, Colorado, where in February, Agilent Technologies Inc. broke ground on a $725 million, 198,000-square- foot expansion at the life sciences company’s campus in Frederick, Colorado. The expansion will double Agilent’s capacity to produce therapeutic nucleic acids, also called therapeutic oligonucleotides or oligos, used for drugs targeting cancer, cardiovascular disease and other ailments. Agi- lent says customer shipments from the expansion should begin in 2026.

Frederick has been a hotbed of activity for Agilent in recent years. In 2016 the company announced a 135,000-square-foot production facility in Frederick that opened in 2019. Just a year later the manufacturer announced a 25,000-square-foot expansion to house an additional production line. That additional production line is expected to go live this year.

Agilent’s latest expansion will add another two production lines as the projected market for oligos continues to grow. The new build will share some utilities with an existing plant and a warehouse will connect the two, but in all other ways it is a greenfield site.

“We started with a blank sheet of paper and voice of the customer, [also] taking what we had built in 2016 on that same site and trying to improve and make it the best we possibly could,” says Mary Beth Gibson, vice president of facilities and engineering for Agilent’s Nucleic Acid Solutions Division of the Diagnostics and Genomics Group.

Of course, Agilent Technologies operates in a highly regulated industry, so that blank sheet of paper likely isn’t quite so blank. Gibson says restrictions aren’t a bad thing. Building a new facility involves a lot of people and many different entities, “so the constraints almost help us corral the ideas.” The vice president says it’s also important that Agilent be “forward looking,” to make its best efforts to predict how those regulations will evolve over time so that what is built remains compliant through the lifecycle of products being manufactured.

“It does give me a little bit of juice to be able to build something I think will stand the test of time,” she says.

Like GAF Energy and Excellerate, flexibility and flow are important considerations in Agilent’s new build, says Gibson. And lessons learned from the existing facility and production lines will be incorporated into this latest venture, as will feedback from employees.

Gibson offered a bit of advice for anyone contemplating a new build or substantial addition, and it boils down to:

• Think before you leap. Take the time, she says, to consider what you want, with the end in mind.
• Perform voice of the customer surveys. Find out what your clients want and what your operators want.
• Don’t rush into detailed designs without perform- ing feasibility and conceptual work up front.
• Don’t let time constraints squeeze these important considerations out of the process.

She suggests it’s okay to ask your peers to review your plans as well. “You can always learn from others within the industry, and [we] leaned very heavily on our architectural engineering firm to give us ideas as well. While you think you may know what you want, they can always come up with some better way to do it.