Unoriginal vs Award-Winning: Adam Akins Saves Time Through Enhanced Setups

Nov 22, 2017

Adam Akins is a new addition to the Contractor Solutions Team. With 10 years of experience in sales at Southwire, he is already an asset to the team. Below, Adam shares a success story of how Southwire’s innovations were able to save a contractor days off of their estimated pull time.

A contractor contacted me about a wire pull he was doing in a large manufacturing facility in Georgia. After evaluating the situation, I was able to help them reengineer their pulls and reduced their estimated six days to just one. The circumstances were that the contractor had 24 reels each with five paralleled legs of 500 kcmil SIMpull THHN® copper wire. The original pulls were on wooden reels that were going into an extremely narrow electrical room. The small dimensions of the room combined with the immense weight of the reels greatly decreased the efficiency of the pull.

I knew that the most effective solution to improve the execution of the pull was Southwire's SIMpull™ Reel. It's designed to reduce the hassle associated with moving, setting up, and paying off and can fit through 36" doorways and can handle up to 6000 lbs in wire. Before, the workers on the jobsite had difficulty maneuvering the wooden reels. Now the crew could roll the SIMpull™ Reels into place and turn them on a dime to get to the best place for the pulls to occur. 

We also utilized both ends of the QWIKrope® pulling rope so that as one reel was being fed into the conduit, the next reel could be prepared and be ready to pull almost immediately after the prior reel was completed. This would have been impossible to do with wooden reels given the lack of space. Setup time between the wooden reels was 45-60 minutes, whereas with the SIMpull™ Reel setup time was reduced to two minutes.

Additionally, the foreman had planned for six people to execute the pulls with the wooden reels. The SIMpull™ Reels cut that number in half, so those six people could handle two pulls in the same amount of time. Six working days was the original estimate for this pull; utilizing Southwire’s innovations decreased that to EIGHT hours.

Watch Akins' technique here and see for yourself how a setup with Southwire's products and solutions can maximize your time, productivity, and reliability. To learn more about how the Contractor Solutions team can help you save time on your estimated pull time, check out contractorsolutions.southwire.com.

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