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Thursday, April 29, 2010

a day in the cabinet shop

We are really growing as a business right now, We are having meaningful discussions at our staff meetings. We are trying to make meaningful changes in our shop. We are trying to make meaningful changes in our process. People don't realize how hard it is to build a business at the same time as you run a business. If we could spend our time on setting up a process than we'd have a great process, but we can't we have to spend our time doing the business. The set up process part is done when we have time, which is usually after hours.

We ran into a problem recently where one of the cabinets that I specified was too big and had to be re-built, kind of the ultimate sin in our business. After talking about the problem with Gagan and Chris we where able to come up with a fast way of changing the cabinet. It is this kind of group work that is where we are growing the most, at that time all three of us were focused on one thing. this problem with the cabinet not fitting has made me think of how we can install a sort of check system into our process.

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Tuesday, April 20, 2010

interesting detail

in the photo's below you can see the top of a column and then a molding that slides down from the column top. the top third of the column is tapered so the molding easily fits over the column and as it slides down it gets tighter and tighter. Gagan made this is the shop. the small molding is one piece, I'm not exactly sure how he made it but it should be noted that the inside cut of the molding is at an angle as to fit snugly to the column on both the top and bottom edge. Nice work Gagan, we can always count on you.

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columns for a mantel

 
 
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Wednesday, April 14, 2010

our buisness model

I was attending a Design Build seminar at a trade show and it was proposed by the speaker to treat your customers like patrons. I completely agree with that, our business model is the same as a restaurant, where the customer is viewed as a patron taking up table space in our dinning room. They will finish meals and return at another time for more meals. the dinning room is our installation capacity, the shop is the kitchen.

Monday, April 5, 2010

the city kitchen

the photo below is off a kitchen that we did last year. It is in a a high rise condo building, which is very difficult to work in. There are restrictive work hours, a limited time to complete the project and very tight quarters during the job as well as getting in and out of the building. I love this photo because of the diamond pattern lattice, it brings a new texture to the room and adds interest. the ceilings are low and the room is small so we need to do embellishments like this.

Today's staff meeting was again very good. We talked about how we can improve what we do. most of it will come from better planning, in the form of the shop drawings. It is important to note that the shop drawings serve to purposes, and every job has two sets of shop drawings, one that is for the clients and one that serves us in house. I don't mean that in a bad way the clients view of the shops must illustrate in the best way what we are going to be delivering. the shops that serve us wouldn't mean anything to the client they would be to technical and to large to be useful to the client. So it is the latter version of the shops that we talked about improving today. unfortunately most of that work falls on me as I am chief engineer. We talked about putting more info on the shops like an installation schedule like day one day two day three and what items needed to be ready in that order. We talked about using the concept of pull work vs. push work and how we can identify those differences on the shops drawings. it was a fairly lengthy discussion on real things that we can do to improve our process and increase the value of our product. The team that we have right now is the best team that we have ever had, and in this harsh economic climate i think we are going to find opportunity and enter into what could be the golden age at KBWC.

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city kitchen

 
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