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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Flat Floors Open Doors

No bumps allowed. That’s the modus operandi inside today’s automated logistics warehouses, and it’s creating a new market for Woodland Hills construction firm Klorman Construction. As fulfillment centers and e-commerce facilities pile goods higher and higher on vertical rack systems, and automated forklifts pick from them, the smoothness of the concrete floors underneath becomes critical. The slightest dent or bump can cause rack systems, some up to 80 feet high now, to topple over, or throw a forklift off its fixed track to veer into the racks, causing damage, loss and downtime. Installing such concrete floors to meet highly precise and stringent standards is bringing more business to the 37-year-old company that till now has specialized primarily in building concrete parking garages and high-rise towers. Chief Executive Bill Klorman said due to California’s construction boom, overall company revenue is up 20 percent currently over last year, and a quarter of it is from superflat floors. “We’ve developed a methodology of installing floors where we’re getting FF (floor flatness) numbers of 240 – which are off the chart,” Klorman said. With these methods, and its own customized concrete formulations, Klorman said his floors are complying with required flatness measurements to within “a third of the thickness of a credit card.” Superflat Today’s e-commerce and fulfillment warehouses are designed to make the precise, highly automated and increasingly delicate operations inside of them ever more efficient. Such businesses are saving on real estate costs by stacking products higher, and the racks closer together, to fit as much product as possible inside. But that also makes them more vulnerable to the automated fork lifts that move rapidly between stacking systems, and as they raise their forks to pick items from the shelves. So the less bumps in the floors, the better, Klorman said. Superflat floors also minimize accidents, damage and the need for repairs. “The flatter the floor is, the taller and faster the rack system can be,” he explained. “It’s an asset that’s having much more of a return on investment than it’s ever had before,” he added. Gretchen Kendrick, chief operating officer for industrial developer Xebec Realty Partners in Seal Beach, said superflat floors are now a market standard. “As buildings focus on higher-tech racking and picking systems, a (super) flat floor system becomes critical for the end user,” she said. The floors also helps smaller companies fit more product under a roof, and that means they can lease or buy the modern warehouses they couldn’t afford several years ago, Klorman said, thus expanding the market. Building owners can also charge higher rents for warehouses with the superflat ones, he added. Formulations With its years specializing in concrete structures, Klorman has begun developing special concrete mixes to deliver near-perfect smoothness. It now makes an athletic concrete that can be ready-mixed without common problems, such as curling and cracking, Klorman said. “These advancements in the concrete mix design ultimately allow us to install the superflat floor concrete in strips approximately 350 feet long with no joints,” he added. No joints mean no bumps, enabling floors to meet the standards for flatness. Members of his long-term staff hold technical and code committee positions within the national American Concrete Institute, the group that develops standards, training and certification for the industry in Farmington Hills, Mich. They now spend time formulating mixtures to add to concrete to get the needed flatness under a broader range of outside conditions, such as heat, cold and high and low humidity, Klorman said. Klorman’s main business remains parking structures. It’s working as the concrete subcontractor on the 525-car garage at 800 S. Flower St. in Burbank for developer Cusumano Real Estate Group. Earlier this month it won the contract for a six-level parking structure in Oceanside for Pelican Properties in Newport Beach. Superflat floors currently account for about 10 percent of Klorman’s overall revenue. While the projects turn around much faster than building parking structures and high-rise buildings, they take greater effort – four times the amount of labor and equipment, according to Klorman. The company’s latest superflat floor is inside a new warehouse with a 75-foot-high ceiling in La Verne for the Foster City drug maker Gilead Sciences Inc. The floor will make the building last longer, and the equipment operate more efficiently and faster, Klorman said. “It looks like that’s going to open up a lot of work,” he said.

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