CTS Komponent® — REPORTS AND NEWS
Toyota Spends a Little More to Save a Lot on Big Warehouse
David B. Rosenbaum
Engineering News Record (ENR), February 24, 1997.
Toyota NAPLD, Ontario, Calif.
11,000 Cubic Yards
600,000 Square Feet
An advanced warehouse that cost about 2.5 time more than a speculatively built, plain vanilla, tilt-up concrete version opened this month in Southern California. Although costing $32 million for construction, Toyota Motor Corporation’s 760,000-sq-ft parts center includes amenities that are expected to save cash in the long run by lowering costs for maintenance, operations, and insurance.
Toyota trimmed life-cycle costs in part by minimizing the number of control joints in the floors. At its 11 other parts centers in the U.S., the company spends a total of about $100,000 annually on repairing floor joints damaged by forklifts. The floors in the new facility were poured by Baker Concrete, Monroe, Ohio, and contain shrinkage-compensating concrete in the areas where forklifts operate. They also contain about one-tenth as many control joints as in a typical warehouse. The super-flat floor is 6 and 8-in. thick, with a surface deviation of less than 1/10 in. per 10 foot.
Toyota also increased operational flexibility by installing extra-fast-acting fire-safety sprinklers. Fire codes generally prohibit storing automotive plastic parts except in designated areas or in racks fitted with sprinklers. The new warehouse steers around the problem with larger sprinkler pipes, a 300,000-gal water tower and a early-suppression fast-response system set to go off at 165 degrees F instead of the more typical 212 degrees F. That allowed plastic part storages throughout the warehouse.
This project cost about $42 per sq ft compared to $17 for a no-frills warehouse, figures John E. Clement, vice president at construction manager/general contractor Snyder Langston, Irvine, Calif. The firm built the shell between June 1995 and August 1996, subcontracting out most of the work and completing the interior installations this month.
“Architecturally it’s a huge box with some very nice frosting on it,” says Loren D. Wohlgemuth, project architect at MNB Architects, a subsidiary of Moffart Nichol & Bonney Engineers Inc., Portland, Ore. In the 850 x 1,000 ft foot-print, steel roof trusses 3-ft deep span as much as 60 ft between columns. The 40-ft high warehouse was conceptually designed by Boston-based architect Elkus Manfredi and sits on a 94-acre site along Interstate 15 in Ontario, Calif.
City officials requested features such as perimeter windows that collectively cost more than $1 million, according to Toyota. “Frosting” also includes internally lit 52-ft-high towers, two on each side, that house air-handling equipment out of the way of the warehouse operations.
Toyota spent a total of $75 million. That included conveyers, racks, computers and $13 million in software, with $42 million for site development, design and construction. “We felt that we optimized the value of the dollars we spent on it,” says Kelly D. Kerns, Toyota’s facilities project manager in Orange, Calif.