This month, Steve Ward and Associates and ForWard Headwall are featured in Nashville Medical News. To sum it up, the article “Building Walls” features a few key quotes from our CEO, Andrew Ward, and some background of what ForWard Headwall is and how it came to be.
Moreover, here is a snippet from the article:
SWA Brings Innovation, Savings to Headwall Construction
Forty years after opening their doors, Steve Ward & Associates remains an industry leader for commercial casework and millwork. While the Nashville-based, family-owned company has been a go-to for industrial cabinetry since 1979… Their forWard® hospital headwall system was recently the topic of an independent, third-party white paper by Layton Construction Company. It details time and cost savings over traditionally constructed headwalls.
Thinking Outside the Box
“For most of our history, we installed headwalls consistent with architectural design. Frequently, this consisted of 3/4″ thick plastic laminate paneling clipped or glued to the face of a gypsum board headwall on conventional metal studs,” explained Andrew Ward, CEO of Steve Ward & Associates. “We stayed in our lane and were doing what the industry usually does.”
That changed in 2008 with the implementation of lean process improvement, designed to map out areas of waste in time and resources. “Lean defines ‘waste’ as anything for which the customer isn’t willing to pay. So we started thinking about the installation process with the end result in mind,” Ward said.
According to the white paper, a traditional headwall installation in Nashville, using Q4 2018 labor rates, required two men 38 hours (or 76 man-hours) to build, at a total cost of $10,766.09. Ward’s team knew there had to be a better way.
The advantages of ForWard Headwalls are clear in our cost-comparison case study. The independent study, created to display the real-time cost differences between ForWard and traditional headwalls, can be found on our website.
In conclusion, check out “Building Walls” by Melanie Kilgore-Hill here, and click here to learn more about ForWard Headwall. You can also view our Hospital Headwall installation video here.
