Brandt wins 2018 TEXO Merit Award for work completed on One Toyota North America Headquarters.
Carrollton, Texas – April 23, 2018 – Brandt has been named Merit Winner in the TEXO Distinguished Building Awards Mechanical 3 Category. This recognition is seen as one of the most prestigious awards in the nation. They embody the skill, commitment and passion that TEXO Members have for construction.
Adding to our corporate campus experience, Brandt concluded this momentous project in 2017. The 2.1 million square-foot campus consolidated Toyota’s four separate North American entities. Our scope of work included installation of the mechanical, plumbing and piping systems throughout the headquarters.
Aside from installation work, our design team assisted heavily with mapping the mechanical and plumbing systems. This proved to be the largest challenge, due to the size of the campus and complexity of the systems.
“We have worked on large corporate buildings in the past, but this was the largest corporate project Brandt has ever been involved with,” Craig Hawkins, Vice President and the Project Executive for the Toyota job, said.
The North America Headquarters is located on 100 acres near the Dallas North Tollway and Sam Rayburn Tollway. Six buildings house conveniences outside of office spaces and communal meeting rooms. Toyota employees are within walking distance to the onsite fitness center, pharmacy, doctor’s office, juice bar, and convenience store. To top it off, employees also have access to a vehicle service center located on the campus.
The headquarters meets the U.S. Green Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) highest certification, platinum. The new facility has many environmentally friendly features to meet these requirements. Brandt installed four 10,000-gallon reservoirs located in the middle of every parking garage. The tanks can collect up to 400,000 gallons of water annually, which irrigate the entire campus.
Reinforcing Toyota’s water conservation efforts, Brandt installed greywater systems to clean and recycle water from the lavatories and sinks. This method treats and reuses large volumes of gently used water with pumps and filtration systems.
This project presented many unique challenges, including the U.S. skilled-labor shortage. Following the recession, the U.S. construction continues to face a major deficiency of skilled workers. At the height of Toyota’s construction, Brandt had 300 skilled-workers onsite.
“Anytime you have to produce the man power for such a large project, it will be difficult,” said Hattie Morse, Trades Recruiting Specialist. “But adding the shortage of skilled workers on top of that increased the pressure.”
This issue is not unique to Brandt. According to the Association of General Contractors, two-thirds of construction firms report difficulty in filling skilled positions.
Despite the tight hiring conditions, this project was a major safety success for Brandt. We finished the 27-month-long project with a total case incident rate (TCIR) of 0.6.
Kerry Roney, Project Safety Director, lead the charge in keeping our employees safe by utilizing Predictive Solutions.
Predictive Solutions utilizes software to identify common pain points, correct at-risk behaviors, and improve hazardous working conditions. As a result, organizations reduce their incident rates, while increasing quality, productivity, and business effectiveness.
“All levels of supervision, foremen, superintendents, and project management went above and beyond industry safety standards,” Kerry said. “This resource, along with our supervision being active in our safety culture really helped our incident numbers stay down,” Kerry said, “and resulted in our team reaching 300,000 man-hours without recordable injury.”
This massive project solidified Brandt’s status as the market leader in MEP construction, and we continue to set the bar safety and quality in the industry.