Unistrut Midwest In-House Engineering Accelerates Project Timelines

As a Sales Engineer for Unistrut Midwest, I get to apply my love of math and science to real-world challenges for our clients. They bring us a problem, and I design the pipe support, MTR system, or other solution to solve it. By partnering with Unistrut Midwest and leveraging our in-house engineering services, our clients see a huge time savings at the beginning of their project when compared to working with someone who needs to outsource their engineering team. This helps to accelerate our clients’ timelines and deliver solutions faster. 

The Sales Engineering Process 

Projects come to my desk through the sales or business development teams, either as an abstract idea that needs to be realized or a set of drawings that need a specific support solution. My job is to take those needs and design a system that meets the client's requirements using our materials. 

With years of experience, Unistrut Midwest has seen just about everything in the secondary support industry. This portfolio of successful designs can often be leveraged as a starting point for a client's solution. Using existing drawings as a jumping-off point, I can then engineer a solution that accommodates the client's specific loading needs, interferences, and other details.  

This strategy works especially well as the majority of my projects require the strength of Sikla products. The modular aspect of Sikla makes it easy to adjust an existing design to solve new problems. And with many of our recent client projects being for data center and advanced manufacturing applications, we are able to leverage a Sikla solution from our portfolio to create the pipe supports, modular racks, and skids that our clients need.  

Our ability to design these solutions in-house is the first step in making sure that our clients can maintain an accelerated timeline that would be otherwise unattainable if designs and sketches had to be sent out to an outside engineering firm.  

Benefits of Partnering with an In-House Engineering Team 

Today's construction industry is all about speed. Timelines are being reduced, and contractors are constantly looking for ways to get their projects built faster. We know that prefabrication with Sikla and Unistrut is a great way to achieve that. These modular materials can be built in a warehouse in tandem with primary construction, delivered to the job site when ready, and installed in a matter of hours instead of weeks. But that speed on the back end of the process is only beneficial if the beginning of the project can be accelerated as well.  

As Unistrut Midwest's in-house sales engineer, it's my job to be an expert on our products. My familiarity with our product line, as opposed to an outsourced engineer who may have never even heard of Sikla, means that I can more quickly recognize which materials will solve which problems for our clients. This expertise allows our team to turn around designs for quotes in a matter of days, as opposed to weeks with outsourced engineering. As we hear from many of our clients, especially those in the data center business, our speed to quote is impressive and often what helps us win jobs.  

This is especially helpful when we work with clients who are in a bind and need a solution yesterday. Unistrut Midwest offers not only our in-house engineering services but an impressive supply of on-hand materials. With that combination, I am able to design solutions using parts that I know we have on hand, cutting lead times and helping our clients bring their solution to market faster.  

Do you have a data center or advanced manufacturing project that could benefit from our engineering services? Let's talk.  

About the Author:

Michael McCalmont is a Sales Engineer at Unistrut Midwest, focusing on Sikla and Unistrut solutions for customer projects.