Why Architects & Commercial Interior Designers Need to Specify Custom Workbenches for Labs and Industrial Facilities
The way we buy furniture for industrial facilities and laboratories has changed radically in just the last few years. How so? The answer is custom furniture — it’s become a mainstream solution thanks to advanced design and manufacturing processes that speed up delivery times and keep costs down. We explain why.
Only Custom Furniture Solutions Can Meet Your Unique Needs And Requirements
No two industrial facilities are alike. No two laboratories are the same.
Some sites are located in multistory buildings within high-density urban areas. Others can be found in the exurbs and rural areas where one-story structures predominate.
And, even if you were to have two physically identical sites, what takes place inside these structures varies tremendously — in the case of industrial facilities, there is a huge variation in specific production processes at work, the levels of automation employed, the speed and volume of production in place, and so forth. The same issue applies to laboratories — the requirements for clinical testing laboratories are hugely different from those of research laboratories for example.
The bottom line is that standard, off-the-shelf furniture solutions often come up short when you are seeking to optimize your industrial production facilities and laboratory environments.
Not convinced? Let’s take a look at five reasons you should consider custom furniture for your next industrial or lab project:
1. Custom Furniture Makes More Efficient Use Of Your Existing Square Footage.
Are you running out of space? Have you outgrown your existing facility? If so, it can be an expensive proposition to build or lease new facilities.
But, before you take that step, why not investigate ways to get more use out of your existing real estate? In many instances, Formaspace has been able to help clients redesign their existing facilities to become more space-efficient while sparing them millions of dollars of unnecessary real estate expenditures.
2. Custom Furniture Workflows Make Your Facility More Productive.
We’re all on the lookout for ingenious ways to make our industrial facilities and laboratories more productive — and more and more companies are implementing next-generation, lean manufacturing principles to improve production workflow and increase quality.
Custom industrial furniture plays a key, supporting role in creating an ideal lean manufacturing environment. For example, our custom storage solutions help keep everything organized on the production line, while our custom ramps and integrated workstations can significantly improve material handling workflow.
Formaspace can even visit your facility, as part of our Rapid Plant Assessment consulting service, to help you uncover new ways to improve your lean manufacturing implementations.
3. Custom Furniture Helps Create A Safer Workplace For Your Workers.
Each year, preventable on-the-job accidents cost employers millions of dollars in compensation claims and lost productivity.
In many cases, careful analysis can pinpoint these likely accident hotspots — allowing you to take corrective action before accidents occur. Custom furniture is often a key part of the solution. For example, in the case of material handling, custom solutions from Formaspace can eliminate the need for employees to lift heavy objects. Meanwhile, in the laboratory, Formaspace can create custom lab layouts that promote safer working practices to help prevent accidental exposure to dangerous chemicals or noxious fumes.
4. Custom Furniture Offers Better Ergonomics For Increased Employee Wellbeing.
Industrial facility managers and laboratory directors are becoming increasingly aware of the need to provide better ergonomic working environments to ensure the well-being of their employees.
Formaspace has been at the forefront of advocating ergonomic solutions, such as our full line of sit-to-stand desks, tables, and workstations that offer height-adjustable worksurfaces. These custom furniture solutions allow your employees to quickly adjust working height at the touch of a button — employees can also raise and lower the working height throughout the day, allowing them to change from a sitting to standing and back to a sitting position for increased circulation and the reduced chance of tinkering back pain from sitting in one position for too many hours of the day.
Formaspace also offers a unique line of industrial seating solutions that are optimized for a variety of applications, ranging from wet laboratories and clean rooms to electronic assembly plants that need ESD protection against accidental electric discharge.
5. Custom Furniture Is More Sustainable, Which Protects Your Investment For Years To Come.
Formaspace custom furniture offers a final benefit: increased ROI, thanks to our long-lasting, heavy-duty furniture designs that will withstand years and years of continuous use.
But there’s more. When you choose modular furniture designs from Formaspace, your investment is secured well into the future. Why? Our modular designs can be reconfigured easily as your production needs change. If you need to move to a different facility, our custom, modular furniture can be easily disassembled using ordinary handtools and reassembled at the new location (protecting your investment).
We call this planned sustainability, which is a far cry from the planned obsolescence that is characteristic of most of the other products available on the market today.
What’s The 4D Process For Creating Your Next Custom Furniture Project With Formaspace?
When people hear the term custom furniture, they often think about long lead times and high costs. But that’s no longer the case. At Formaspace, we make custom products (in both large and small quantities) at prices that approach those of standard products. And the lead times for custom furniture are now comparable to those of standard furniture deliveries as well, thanks to the modern manufacturing methods we have put in place at our Austin, Texas factory headquarters.
Let’s step through the process of ordering custom furniture.
The Formaspace Industrial Design & Engineering team is ready to work with you to co-create custom furniture designed for your unique needs. We work with you each step of the way, beginning with the ideation, design, and engineering stages, using the latest software technology designed to integrate with your processes, not the other way around.
We call this the 4D process, which stands for Discover, Design, Develop, and Deliver.
Discover
Custom furniture development starts with a collaborative discovery process in which we work together with our clients to identify their specific design requirements and to share ideas of what’s possible, based on our extensive experience working with thousands of companies in the industry.
Design
We work closely with your team to evaluate the unique design requirements of the project to come up with different design alternatives that could satisfy your unique needs. In many cases, interactive 3-D graphics or photorealistic renderings are created to help visualize and narrow down the preferred solution.
Develop
Once the design concepts are approved, we can build physical prototypes for on-site evaluation and testing, shipped to you from our factory headquarters here in Austin, Texas.
Often, these full-size working prototypes serve to provide important user feedback that is used to refine the final production designs.
Deliver
Once the designs are released for production, we build your custom furniture in our Austin factory, test fit it on our factory floor, and then prepare it for shipping to your facility. We also offer post-sales support as well as onsite professional installation services, which reduce your need to manage multiple vendors.
