Preparing for the future 

Skyscrapers were invented in America, and were a longtime and special source of national pride in the era that came to be known as the American Century.

Even after losing its crown as the world’s tallest commercial structure, the Empire State Building is recognizable and beloved in the New York City skyline. Early images of the building included blimps—then seen as the future of overseas travel—moored at the top, where a custom house greeted travelers.

The little-known saga of the speedy construction of the Empire State Building offers potent lessons. Now, nearly a century later, they would fit right into any effort to improve productivity in new construction or service and maintenance in 2025.

In addition, those lessons make a compelling modern argument that it is time to add a new member to the staff—a product manager—who will take field productivity in new construction and service/maintenance to greater heights.

Going back in time

But first, let’s look back over nine decades and recall what the historic team of architects, engineers, fabricators, distributors, contractors, tradesmen and others did to erect the world’s tallest building in the same time that it might have taken in 1930 to build two single-family houses, one after the other.

We would narrow the explanation of how the Empire State Building came to be built with such unprecedented speed, never to be equaled again, into three main factors. First, significant credit belongs to the uncharacteristically harmonious combination of talents and determination among the owners, architects and general contractor. Second was the drive to standardize large and small architectural components. Third, the team ensured efficiency with highly choreographed and disciplined systems for vertical and horizontal transportation of new building materials and construction leftovers.

We want to focus on the third factor because it’s our favorite part of the story—and because it deals with aspects of new construction and service and maintenance where an electrical contractor can control costs, produce profit and stay on schedule.

As the building went up, a narrow-gauge railway was progressively installed around the perimeter of each floor to transport materials. In the image above, we can catch a glimpse of the narrow-­gauge railway in use. It’s not holding electrical products, but the idea is abundantly clear.

This was just one aspect of a material-handling system that was so well-conceived and deftly executed that it handled 500 trucks, all scheduled in a perfect sequence, to arrive and be unloaded every day on city center streets. That was a dramatic indication of the logistics capability engendered in the project.

While we are all well-accustomed to pairing “labor” and “material” these days, it seems far more appropriate to be speaking in terms of “products” instead of material. Here, word choice matters.

Looking back at the ingenious methods the designers and contractors employed, we now prefer to classify their well-orchestrated measures as product management.

Product management today

In present-day construction industry thinking, much attention goes to two things: prefabrication and material handling. Prefabrication often seems to be regarded as a universal remedy in construction, much the same as penicillin was once hailed as a wonder drug.

Likewise, on-the-job material handling has maintained its constant status as a hobgoblin in academic studies and ordinary conversation about construction productivity. But prefabrication and material handling occupy only some of the frames in the feature-length movie of new construction and service/maintenance businesses.

The complete story of product management runs all the way from the initial product selection, to its installation and beyond to the end of its useful life. So the challenges and rewards of smart product management go much farther than just the popular subjects of prefabrication and material handling.

Given the evolving nature of new construction and service/maintenance, we believe that comprehensive product management calls for the creation of a new position in electrical contractors’ organizations: product manager.

In most companies, this can begin as an added duty for someone, especially in smaller firms. It is a job that someone with an estimating, accounting and, of course, a purchasing background might be adept at, partly because of the cost analysis it requires. Given the unpredictable demands of their everyday responsibilities, most project managers or labor superintendents would not be well-positioned to become part-time product managers.

In a rough analysis, a product manager’s time and effort might be allocated this way:

• 40% debottlenecking of in-process problems
• 30% conveying of products from beginning to end
• 20% product selection and standardization
• 10% learning opportunities at industry conferences, trade shows and other education sessions

In the absence of a product manager, the selection and purchasing of products is currently too often a purely reactionary response. That’s where warping of the triangular connection between time, cost and scope can dramatize the hazards of not having good product management.

A product manager needs to be in the top tier of the company’s management team; on par with project managers with respect to enforcing standards. In that regard, the “say” a product manager has must be very much like the authority granted to a safety manager. This new role will own the solutions for product maintenance from end to end over their useful lifetime.

Aspects of the role will include creating SKUs, providing learning materials, conducting product training and introducing new approaches such as point-of-use packaging. It will also require taking the long view of products to be installed by the company’s construction group but attended to by the company’s service and maintenance team over many subsequent years.

The Empire State Building as a case study

The principles used to erect the Empire State Building so quickly can be put to use today. If the role of electrical contractor can be defined simplistically as taking electrical products on the last mile of their journey that began with their original manufacturer and extended to their final point of installation, a product manager extends that journey further along the product’s lifespan. In the process, a product manager can contribute in a new way to the productivity of any construction project or service activity. After all, “productivity” begins with “product.”