| Nooter Construction: Strong as Steel |
| Construction | |
| Written by Liz Jones | |
| Monday, 01 October 2007 | |
 Jim Nelson describes how this industrial contractor is diversifying its product offerings and putting a When 18-year-old Jim Nelson joined Nooter Corporation as a boiler maker in the 1970s, the company was fabricating vessels and components and distributing them worldwide. A field department traveled site to site repairing vessels and assembling products that were too large to ship. It later spun off into what is now known as Nooter Construction Company. By the 1980s, Nooter Construction was a $100 million company with a regional office in Philadelphia. The opportunity arose for the company to purchase one of its competitors in Toledo, giving it a solid base in the Ohio Valley, where a large portion of its work was located. Today, the St. Louis, Mo.-based company generates about $350 million in revenue providing welding, pipe fitting, and boiler maker services to the oil refining, petrochemical, chemical, utilities, food and beverage, cogeneration, and pulp and paper industries, among others.  Jim Nelson, President According to Nelson, now president of Nooter Construction, diversification has been key to Nooter Construction’s success. “We work in a variety of industries, so when one is up the other is down, and vice versa. We keep everything on a steady keel.” The company plans to further diversify with a start-up thermal spraying business. Thermal spraying involves the application of hot, liquid metal to eroding or corroding base metal. The technology now being patented will not only allow Nooter Construction to better serve its existing client base, but also break into some markets where it does not currently do business, including the mining and cement industries. “We are launching this business because we are heavily dependent on the refining and power industries. In the summer, refineries and power generating facilities are busy making gasoline and selling electricity for air conditioning, and during the winter, they are selling heating oil and electric heat. They don’t want to shut down during those times, so we tend to get very busy in the spring and fall. We see thermal spraying as an opportunity to smooth out those big dips,” said Nelson, adding that the company expects to get the thermal spraying business up and running by end of 2007, after thoroughly testing and receiving patents on several products. Creating efficiencies When Nelson took over the presidency of Nooter Construction three years ago, one of the first tasks on his to-do list was to create a sense of consistency between the St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Toledo offices. Together, he and his team created the Nooter Management System (NMS), which not only meets OSHA safety 18002 and environmental 14001 standards, but also ISO 9002 quality standards. NMS is now in its second year of implementation, and a third-party auditing team ensures the company sticks to its guns. Nelson recalled the safety department at one time used more than 60 forms, but with NMS in place, that number has been reduced to 30. “We streamlined our processes and documentation so that all three offices do business efficiently and in the same manner,” Nelson said, adding that all forms and procedures will soon be located on a company-wide intranet. NMS also allows the company to easily transfer employees between offices and bring new employees up to speed more quickly than it could in the past. In addition to NMS, Nooter Construction has a strict safety program to protect employees and customers from workplace hazards. “When I was new to the industry, companies talked about employee modification rates, which are determined by an insurance company. Over the years, we quit talking about that and talked about lost-time accidents. From there, it migrated into recordable injury rates. Now, we’ve gotten to the point that we talk about near misses and first-aid injuries—if you can knock those out, recordable injuries won’t be an issue,” said Nelson. The safety program starts at the top with a fundamental belief that any job can be done without injury. Full-time supervisors and employees participate in intense safety training, and since the majority of the company’s workforce is made up of contracted union craftsmen, extensive training is done on-site prior to each project. According to Nelson, follow-up training and inspection is a must. Before a crew begins work in the morning, they conduct a job safety analysis (JSA), outlining what needs to be done that day and what hazards are associated with those tasks. Another JSA is done after lunch to discuss the afternoon’s proceedings. Nooter Construction is working with local and regional unions to develop comprehensive training programs for craftsmen. “We have an opportunity to interject some of our safety expectations and what we want to see in a journeyman when he graduates from an apprenticeship program,” Nelson said. In fact, Nooter Construction recently helped develop a 55-hour classroom training program for project managers and foremen that covers how to handle a project from the bidding stage all the way to close out. Nooter Construction’s attention to safety procedures has paid off—November 7, 2001 was the last time the company experienced a lost-time accident, and the company is currently pushing 1.5 million man hours without a recordable injury for 2007. “When you consider the transient nature of our work and the number of hours we spent on the job, that is pretty good,” said Nelson. When someone does get hurt, Nooter Construction encourages employees to report any and all symptoms. “If you think you have something in your eye, report it. We’d rather tend to the problem immediately rather than waiting for it to get worse,” Nelson said. “Like the old adage, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” |
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American Executive is a RedCoat Publishing publication.
American Executive is a RedCoat Publishing publication.
