Global Investor Display
In House : Prototyping & Research
The CEO of Saint Gobain hosted a tour of Saint Gobain’s North American R&D facility in late 2023, inviting a small collection of global investors and stakeholders to see our capabilities and recent work.
We were asked to create a display unit for One Precision Assemblies (OPA), our new offsite construction product, at full scale. We were instructed to show our system, it’s strengths, and how it can integrate with our global portfolio.
I served as a ‘Project Lead’, coordinating the design, manufacturing, logistics, and presentation experience of the OPA Display Unit
With a very high level of administrative support (and pressure) for this tour and a very limited amount of time to deliver our display, I found myself asking…
If we’re going to put on a show, how can we get the most out of it?
Low-Fidelity Mockup Sketch to confirm display location with stakeholders
What if instead of building this in house, we worked with our CMOs to…
Validate our system at full scale
To test our working process with our manufacturing partners, we contracted them to build the unit in-factory, exactly the way they would for a job.
Co-develop our manufacturing details
Design and Manufacturing teams can have different perspectives of what is ‘easy’, or ‘repeatable’, so we brought our team to rework details in real time
Run installer pain-point studies
Some high-performance details are difficult or uncomfortable to make. We ran time studies, interviews, and a/b tests to see what got the best results.
Factory Organization, Material Acquisition, and Scheduling
Transitioning from CAD to factory is a complicated process for offsite construction. Managing long lead time items, storing bulk materials, and coordinating time in the factory schedule all caused issues at one point or another. This became a benchmark for how to (and how not to) organize the next stage of factory development.
Site Coordination and Logistics
There are no good pictures for it, but after getting location approval from the Site Director and building the module, the majority of the work was around Health and Safety (HSE), Fire Department and City approvals for the location, access, and equipment needed to display the module. I coordinated the purchase of the tent, organized and managed the shipping, craning, covering, lighting, and flooring of the display area to present our work.
Interior and Exterior Finishing : Installer Demos and Hands-On Testing
Our factory process currently ships panels without interior or exterior finishing, but we were instructed to display the unit with a range of certainteed finishes. I set up a series of ‘installation days’ where professional installers joined to teach our team how to correctly install our products, and then our team completed the work independently. This was the first time many people got to try installing the products that they helped to design.
Final Display Unit
The final display unit consisted of a 25’ x 12’ “module” showing our panelized wall system, and an 8’ x 15’ roof display unit, all within a 70’ enclosed, carpeted tent area. We were able to showcase a range of our new and updated exterior finishes, our newly released interior finishes (see: Prefinished Gypsum for more on that), and our integration with new corporate acquisitions for windows and metal exterior cladding.
The module also served as a stage for presentations. While nobody on our team was a high enough pay grade to attend the event, five product lines were improved as a direct result of the experience working on this display.
