Excellerate Expands Operations to Meet Customer Needs

The second half of 2019 was an exciting time for Excellerate. In July 2019, we closed on the purchase of an existing distribution facility in the Olathe, Kansas area with approximately 450,000 square feet of office and manufacturing space. In contrast, the building we were already occupying in the area was only 60,000 square feet. Doing some quick and easy math, that means our new facility is approximately 7.5 times larger than our previous facility!

As a new leader to Excellerate entrusted with overall responsibility for the new facility, the past eight months have been both exciting and challenging. In order for us to operationally meet the needs of our current and future customers, the building needed to be modified and upgraded in several areas. The most critical and impressive upgrades were to the environmental controls of the facility. The previous facility did not have any air conditioning, which would present an issue in maintaining sensitive electrical equipment at required humidity levels, especially during a humid Kansas summer! To solve that problem, we purchased 12 industrial air conditioning units and installed them on the roof, setting them in place via the use of helicopters. Internally, we replaced all the lights with more energy-efficient fixtures and added state-of-the-art building control systems, along with other overall facility updates.

When it came time to put the moving plans together, our operations and materials managers told me they were going to move the entire 60,000 square foot facility in no more than three days without any injuries and without missing any customer shipments. Needless to say, I was skeptical. However, they accomplished just that during the first week of December. The entire facility worked to build future orders ahead of time. Each cell lead put together a detailed moving plan for their area that identified required PPE, lock-out tag-out requirements and heavy lift requirements. They executed the move plan to perfection and emptied the old building in three days!

We’ve been operating out of the new facility for the past couple months and are already leveraging the space to drive increased value to our critical customers. We’re now able to store more raw material and finished goods, which allows us to deliver toward our just-in-time (JIT) goals, be more flexible with our workforce, and manage workloads more efficiently. Our sales team is engaging with customers to quote products that we previously could not have operationally manufactured, and we’ve added new personnel to help us manage the new space and operational capability in a more effective and efficient manner.

Overall, our increased operational capability in the Kansas area will allow Excellerate to expand upon our existing products and services that drive the modularization of the electrical construction industry. The future promises to be exciting and challenging, and we wouldn’t have it any other way!