Barton Malow Company is all about bringing the best and the brightest together with the customer to design the optimal building plan...
By James Buchanan
Success for Barton Malow Company can be summed in two points: efficiently meeting its customers’ needs and outperforming its competitors by attracting and retaining the best of the next generation of construction architects and engineers.
To address the former issue, the Southfield, Michigan company, asks its customers to invest in the planning and subsequent phases of the building process by including clients in the design team for their own project.
To achieve the latter, Barton Malow aggressively to competes for team members by working with a number of educational entities, offering a multi-year internship program, and through the company’s reputation for integrity, commitment and leadership.
Finding the Next Generation…
Founded in 1924, Barton Malow spent its first 50 years as a general contractor. However, in the early 1970s the company concluded that remaining competitive and assuring long-term growth meant broadening its services. Today, the company has grown into a broad breadth construction services firm handling all phases of a project, from planning to close-out, nationally and in Mexico and Canada.
Where Barton Malow sees its greatest potential for growth, says Doug Maibach, vice president of corporate affairs, is by expanding their domestic capabilities by growing its regional offices.
The number one challenge to accomplishing regional expansion, Maibach says, is finding and hiring key operational leaders. Under the current company structure each regional office is led by a regional operations vice president, with operational managers overseeing individual projects.
While Maibach says Barton Malow has been very fortunate to have a strong staff throughout the company, growing its regional capabilities means finding, hiring and developing team members and teams with a deep understanding of the core elements of the company’s mission.
“The challenge with this,” he says, “has been the availability of trained and educated personnel. The reasons behind this have to do with the retirement of the Baby Boom generation, a lesser number of new people entering the market, and strong growth nationally in the construction industry making this process very competitive.”
Critical to competing for talented personnel, says Maibach, is the reputation of the company. “We do a lot of networking, and people come to us because they know what we stand for as far as our values,” he says, “and we seek people who best fit our mold.”
Maibach adds that the company defines its “mold” as its culture which is comprised of the following elements:
• Leadership – they should hold a high degree of expertise, innovation, be team oriented (“we are not looking for superheroes,” Maibach says) and decisive decision making.
• A strong commitment to the customer and their employees
• And integrity, which he describes as the bedrock of their long-term success. “We are not looking for short-term profit at the expense of the long-term success of the company,” he says.
Maibach says the company practices its commitment to its employees on three key levels.
He says they are a very open company so that employees understand the goals and mission of the company. This means that communication is critical and not fittered down in any way. “We put out the good, the bad, and the ugly because it is very important for the people who work for us to understand everything we are trying to do,” he says.
Communication is viewed to be a two-way street as well. The company routinely listens to its employees through annual employee surveys held just prior to its annual planning sessions. This is matched with customer feedback as a key tool to their future planning.
Lastly, compensation and benefits are competitive, and the company is always looking for ways to be innovative in this area.
As one example, Maibach says they are currently reviewing and updating their travel and relocation policies. The company is also one of the few construction companies to offer employees Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and Maibach says they are very pleased with how many are taking advantage of them.
Maibach describes the HSAs as a cutting edge way for the company and employees to return greater control of medical choices to the individual.
To help develop the next generation of builders, the company forms partnerships with the educational entities they work with as customers to market construction as a career choice. For example, they support construction education projects in both high schools and colleges, and teach children about the construction of their own schools. The company also has a very strong internship program where they bring interns in on a multi-year basis in order to form strong relationships with the company and identify the strongest graduates to recruit. As the interns return summer after summer they also are able to grow in expertise and assume additional responsibilities.
Barton Malow Company’s success in their efforts is displayed in the awards they have won for their human resources practices. Five times in the last six years, the company has been listed as one of Metro Detroit’s Best Places to Work based on its performance in the categories of compensation, individual growth, organizational performance, work schedules, communication practices, quality of life benefits, working conditions, diversity, and retirement related benefits. In recent years, the company has won 27 awards for its dedication to developing a diverse workforce.
Company Overview…
The company is headquartered in Southfield, Mich., with regional offices in Maryland, Virginia, Arizona, Ohio, Illinois, Florida and Georgia, which amounts to something of a whose who of states and regions experiencing demographic and industrial growth.
“Within each of these regions,” says Maibach, “our offices can execute in all of the niches and services offered by the company with the exception of the automotive and power industries.” These latter industries are handled by dedicated offices within the company’s fold. So, rather than having individual regional offices specialize in specific disciplines each is able to work within all disciplines, and niches with access to all corporate resources.
The company’s service areas include architecture, program management, construction management, design/build, and general contracting.
Barton Malow Design, a subsidiary, offers services in the areas of architectural design, feasibility studies, master planning, programming, space planning, interior design, and constructability reviews.
The niche industries they specialize in are health care, education from elementary through university levels, commercial and industrial facilities, power plants and sports and special events venues. Some of the more notable buildings they have produced include the University of Maryland Dental School; the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Maryland; the John Paul Jones Multipurpose Arena at the University of Virginia; the Fletcher Alan Healthcare Renaissance Project in Burlington, Vermont; Boll Family YMCA in Detroit; and the First Horizon Park in Greensboro, North Carolina to name a few.
Overall, the company has approximately 1,100 full-time staff, including 625 trades personnel, and has worked in 37 states with sales during the past five years in excess of $1 billion annually. In total, this makes Barton Malow Company the tenth largest construction company in the United States.
The Customer as Design Team Member…
Key to the company’s success says Maibach, is that Barton Malow Company operates on the philosophy that the planning phase is where team involvement and innovation can intersect to produce the most efficiencies and cost savings. Critical to this process, he says, is asking the customer to heavily invest in the planning and subsequent phases.
“Some customers wouldn’t want to commit their own resources to this aspect of our process,” Maibach says, “but this is what leads to the best planning, decision making and outcome. This is especially true as the project matures and a smooth decision flow is essential to efficiency. If an issue arises, then there is already a team in place that includes the customer to make timely decisions.”
Basically, Barton Malow Company begins by building a team composed of the customer, engineers, architects, major designers, preconstruction specialists, and construction management team, which includes subcontractors. Ideally, the team will co-locate in order to work together to develop a plan for all aspects of the construction. “It works best if they all can be in the same place physically rather than remotely,” says Maibach.
Once the vision and design concepts are created the project moves into the formal design phase, which is where the technical documents needed to build the facility are developed. Involving the subcontractors in this phase is very important, Maibach says, because as architects and engineers design solutions for technical issues the subcontractors are there in a coordinated way to make these changes in one fluid step.
Another key reason for the customer to be so invested in the process relates to owner furnished equipment for the new facility. Generally, says Maibach, consideration of this aspect wouldn’t happen until later in the process, but if handled during the planning process the particulars of their equipment can be incorporated into the design documents.
This step minimizes construction changes keeping the project on budget and schedule.
By way of example, Maibach points to a project the company recently completed for General Motors, where change orders were less than 2 percent of construction costs. Maibach says 5 to 10 percent is the industry norm.
To take the example a bit further, during the planning phase is when technical innovations within the industry play their biggest role. Most significant of these is the development of three dimensional CAD modeling, which allows designers to create a multi-dimensional image of the building during design. This software, which is commonly known as Building Information Modeling, greatly minimizes redesign and rework during construction.
According to Maibach, with this and other investments in software and training by Barton Malow Company, the General Motors project mentioned above finished out at 15 percent under budget and three months early.
During the course of its projects, teams ask clients for formal performance evaluations, which helps fulfill an important requirement for the company’s ISO quality certification – continual improvement of job processes. According to Maibach, progress comes in great part from listening to customers, so the company maintains an active customer satisfaction program.
Once the building is finished, the company does what they call a “close-out” where a final performance evaluation is conducted. This is handled by specialized employees, says Maibach, that take these lessons learned, improvements, and etc., and put this information in a database where Barton Malow Company’s preconstruction services can access it and apply it to upcoming projects. “Because we take this kind of constant analysis very seriously and constantly seek to improve on what we do a majority of our business is through repeat customers,” he says.
Supplying the Demand…
One of the facts of the construction trades generally is that it is important to maintain dynamic supply chains in order to adapt to ever fluctuating markets. For Barton Malow Company this means working with a number of national and regional suppliers as well as looking outside of the U.S. for materials, says Maibach.
Price volatility is a driving force behind supply chain adaptability. For example, over recent months copper, concrete and petroleum products (such as PVC piping) have seen sharp price fluctuations. To help address this, the company relies in part on industry associations such as the Associated General Contractors of America to help them follow trends and stay on top of price fluctuations as they may occur.
Also, with international competition for resources occurring more and more, the company, in the words of Maibach, “looks the other way.” What he means by this is they have to look for global solutions to expand their supply chain. One example is that they have gone as far as South Korea for steel.
Another aspect of their supply chain is sub-contractors. To manage this they keep a database of pre-approved regional subcontractors, says Maibach, that includes their respective area of expertise. The pre-approval process is designed to assure that Barton Malow has have the best in the business by examining potential subcontractor’s insurance coverage, safety record, claims, workforce strength, and other indicators to assess if they have the capabilities to perform the work and deliver on the project.
This is handled online where prospective sub-contractors submit for review their safety results, insurance information, ability to do the work and references. According to Maibach, Barton Malow Company will also work with insurers to assess a prospective subcontractor as insurers are becoming more involved in managing their exposure to risk.
The company will rarely go to jobsites due to the time and effort involved and issues regarding going to a competitor’s jobsite, says Maibach.
Technology…
Barton Malow Company has also been a leader in the industry in its use of technology. For example, in 2002 Information Weekly named the company one of the 500 most innovative information technology companies worldwide, and one of the top 15 most innovative companies in the construction/engineering industry in 2005.
Among the reasons why they received this honor is their use of Plug and Play phones, which, according to Maibach, are able to be plugged into any phone jack and a signal will recognize it as a particular employee’s phone, no matter where they are in the building. Also, the same is true for computers in that wherever the employee is the phone and computer are instantly integrated into the system no matter their location, he says.
The value to this is that as teams are changed as one project ends and another begins there is instant integration with a new team in a new office.
The company also has what they have titled the Barton Malow System, which is an Internet-based application that enables all operational procedures, documents, and checklists to be available online to all employees.
For the company’s project management system Barton Malow uses Prolog, which is an intranet-based program that allows all information on a single project to be stored in a single relational database.
“Information modeling software and all of our technologies are great tools, but they also keep us on the cutting edge,” says Maibach, “which makes us attractive to younger employees who are very vested in technology and the more advanced you are as a company the more attractive you are.”
It is one thing for a company to say they put their customers first; it is another to implement a guiding business philosophy that actually does this. Maibach says, by incorporating their clients directly into their design team and using available technologies to their best advantage Barton Malow Company has managed to build a solid foundation for their business.