How to keep the right products from being value engineered out of your building.

The term "penny wise and pound foolish" has been around for more than 500 years - and it holds true today as much as it did when it was first uttered so long ago. There are many interpretations of the phrase, but one of the best is to be stingy about small things, only to have them cost you more in the end. Think of someone who buys cheap clothing, but has to replace it more often, or someone who doesn't change the oil in their car because they don't want to pay for the service, but end up having huge expenditures later due to lack of maintenance.

It's this phrase that comes to mind when someone mentions yet another phone call about "your shoddy roll up door that's breaking all the time."

Yes, there are times when there are issues or errors in a product, but so often the wrong overhead roll up door is installed because the right one was value engineered out of a project. It happens a lot with high performance rolling products, as they are more expensive than standard roll up doors - but there are very real, tangible costs to installing the wrong overhead door that can more than double the cost of the less expensive option.

But the pull of value engineering is strong. You'll need to convince a budget-strapped executive to keep a more expensive product in. A great way to convince them is to outline what will happen if they decide to choose the less expensive option. In the case of high performance roll up doors, it's not pretty.

Productivity Can Tank

Putting a standard overhead door in where high preference rapid roll doors should be used will directly impact productivity in two significant ways:

First, consider timing. A standard overhead rolling service door can open at about eight inches per second. This can feel like an eternity if you're driving a fork truck and waiting for it to open. Pausing, even for as little as 20 seconds to wait for a door to open, can end up costing hours and days of productivity in a 24x7 operation that uses the door for every pass through. Sure, you may not "see" those costs easily, but they're there, and they're expensive.

Then, consider maintenance delays: You may find that your coiling door is often “out of service” or “closed for repairs” causing employees to reroute to a different overhead door that’s further away. When you run a standard overhead rolling door more often than is recommended, you can overheat the motor, wear out components, or even snap springs - rendering the garage door useless.

In contrast, high performance rapid roll doors open at speeds of up to 24 inches per second, and are constructed to withstand heavy continuous use. They don’t need maintenance outside of daily checks, and they can be springless, which removes another potential point of failure. The extra money spent on installing a high performance garage door will quickly be recouped through the increased steady pace of productivity.

You’ll Lose Money

In addition to the financial ramifications of lower productivity, there are other ways that a standard rolling door can lose you money. Speaking of money….If you own or manage a facility that requires a regulated temperature and you choose to install a standard roll up door, you might as well be throwing your money out that door every time it cycles.

Remember the speed issue we talked about earlier? That eight inches per second opening speed of a standard door is a long time for blustery winter winds to enter a facility, or hot summer temperatures to counteract air conditioning. This can impact your energy costs for the entire lifetime of the garage door. Again, these costs aren’t easily seen, but certainly felt in the wallet.

When a door is “out of service” or “closed for repairs”, employees will need to spend extra time because forklifts may have to go out of their way to use an operational overhead doors and more product is going through  fewer openings. If each employee takes an extra 4 minutes, multiply that by the 50 people working in the factory, that’s 200 minutes, or 3.3 hours per day.

If this is a 365 operation, the yearly impact is 3.3 x 365 = 1,204.5 hours per year.

If the average salary is $20 per hour, this translates into a very real cost of $24,090 per year in lost productivity.

Your Safety is at Risk

If losing time and money aren’t enough to convince you to fight to keep high-performance rapid roll doors in a project, how about the safety and security of everyone working in your facility? A standard commercial garage door is manufactured using springs which can fail if it is overused. A snapped spring will cause the overhead door to slam shut, putting everyone at risk of injury. In addition, standard roll up doors don’t come automatically with the most advanced light curtain safety technology. Often, they come with photo eyes at the bottom of the garage door, which are certainly safer than no safety precautions, but consider this example. One of your employees is carrying a 5’ long item on their shoulder while they walk through the opening of an overhead coiling door – Once their legs pass the range of the photo eye it is no longer known that they are carrying a 5’ long item on their shoulder. The coiling door could come down while the item is still in the opening, catapulting the item in the air while possibly injuring the employee or employees around them. Even with a photo eye and sensing edge, this damage is possible - damaged product, workman’s comp - the list of costs can go on.

So, if you need ammunition to convince someone to keep high performance rapid roll doors in a project, even though it’s more expensive, remember that a standard overhead door installed where a high performance door is needed can cost you time, money and safety throughout the lifetime of the door. It’s the definition of being penny wise and pound foolish.

Want more information? See our full line of high-performance rapid roll doors.

Siva Davuluri 
Siva Davuluri serves as director of product strategy for high performance doors at CornellCookson Inc. He has been in his current role for five years at the Mountain Top, PA based company, which is the largest coiling door manufacturer in the USA. Davuluri has more than ten years of experience in design, development and commercialization of new products. He graduated from North Dakota State University with a Master of Mechanical Engineering degree and completed his Master of Business Administration degree from Cornell University. He is also a member of the technical committee for high performance doors at DASMA, North America’s trade association for manufacturers of garage doors, rolling doors, high performance doors and access systems.





Cookson continues to lead in innovations in roll up door, security gate and closure products. To inquire how Cookson’s experts and customer service can help you with your next roll up door project, call 1-800-294-4358.