Innovation is one of McKinstry’s core values.

Throughout 2016, McKinstry’s Western Washington Region organized an “Everyday Innovation” campaign that set out to share innovations and recognize innovators company-wide. We chose this name for the campaign because even smaller-scale or “everyday” innovations can make a big difference in improving the way we work.

All said, the organizers of the campaign have received more than 60 submissions that highlight an impressive array of creative thinking and have sparked discussions about innovation throughout McKinstry.

While the campaign is ongoing, we’ll be featuring nine of the very best innovation submissions we’ve received thus far in a series of Everyday Innovation posts.

Visual Display of Engineering Analysis

McKinstry has sought to step up our game and take greater care in the visual display of our engineering efforts, as you can see in the above photo.

Whether through selling our approach, communicating a workflow plan, sharing sensitivity analysis results, or making an equipment recommendation, our engineering team is presenting complex information clearly and concisely.

In doing so, they are providing compelling engineering analysis to key project decision makers.

Smart Plug

McKinstry helped to implement these smart plug devices for Brooks Running in Seattle’s Stone34 building, and they’ve been tremendously successful. Because our energy management team is measuring the whole building’s plug load, we were able to measure the overall energy savings via these devices.

Since November 2014, Brooks Running has realized a 60 percent energy savings! McKinstry’s energy management team is also using these devices on their office work stations and tracking the subsequent energy savings.

“Roy Shack”

This “Roy Shack” (named for the foreman who came up with the concept) is a mobile break room designed to be easily moved around high-rise jobsites so workers can spend less time in transit between work locations and the break room.

Because many of its structural components are on hinges—making them foldable and collapsible—the Roy Shack can fit in a standard man-lift on a job site. The Roy Shack was designed and built entirely in-house by McKinstry’s carpentry shop team.

The Roy Shack is currently being piloted on a select few job sites, with plans to roll out to more job sites in the future.

This post is the second in the Everyday Innovation series. The last post is viewable here, and the first post is here.