A bird’s eye view taken Monday from inside Whirlpool Corp.’s Benton Harbor Technology Center. The center opened seven months ago and houses more than 230 employees. (Tony Wittkowski | HP Staff)
By Tony Wittkowski | Business Reporter | The Herald-Palladium
BENTON HARBOR – Peering inside Whirlpool Corp.’s Benton Harbor Technology Center is like stepping into a spaceship.
Seven months in its infancy, the new center at 151 N. Riverview Drive in places resembles Tony Stark’s lab from “Iron Man” and houses the minds of Whirlpool’s engineering team.
The 150,000-square-foot building doesn’t seem that big from the outside, until you’re led through the various rooms and halls. Of course, the $18.6 million renovation needs to be large to accommodate the more than 230 workers. The building once known as Plant 7 used to serve as one of Whirlpool’s assembly plants.
I’m greeted by Ryan Strain, a design manager for refrigeration at Whirlpool. He will be my guide this afternoon.
Near the main greeting desk on a wall is a larger than life Whirlpool sign that looks familiar.
“This is the actual logo that used to be on the outside of the production facility,” Strain said. “This is the outdoor logo they had sandblasted and painted up. Now it lives here.”
Past the main offices is what Strain calls, “The War Room.” The room is made up of glass walls allowing zero privacy with microphones hanging from the ceiling, which are accompanied by a large flat-screen TV that has two rotating cameras. These are used to follow your every movement during conference calls.
Out of the 39 meeting rooms in the center, Strain says the War Room is used for hour-long meetings every day on big projects.
Whiteboards can be seen on nearly every wall from inside Whirlpool Corp.’s Benton Harbor Technology Center. (Tony Wittkowski | HP Staff)
One of the louder areas in the facility is the mechanical reliability lab. There, dozens of refrigerators are tested for durability. With the swing-arm tests, robotic arms open and close refrigerator doors – filled with blocks of wood to add a weighted stress – to see how long they can stay on their hinges. Strain says the machine that operates the arm counts how many times the door opens before it begins to sag from overuse.
“We have a test that also flexes the gaskets on a refrigerator,” Strain says. “We want to know how many times it’s going to take before they flatten out. In this lab, we test the durability of what the consumer touches on a daily basis.”
Inside another hall that leads to another area, I begin to realize about every other wall has a whiteboard on it with a few scribbles and unreadable notes.
The tour comes to a wall outside the kitchen area that holds several ID cards. Each card is somehow suspended to the wall, as Strain explains a portion of the wall is covered with magnetic paint for this purpose.
The lounge/lunch area has several tables, including three booths in the back with lights that depict large ice cubes suspended in the air. Above the tables are speakers built into the ceiling with projectors that drop down through two holes in the wall. They are used for all-hands-on-deck meetings, Strain says.
Even the tables and chairs are worth a second look. Employees on a break can lounge in chairs that have power strip and USB plug-ins attached along the sides.
Simulating an atmosphere
The building features state-of-the-art labs where refrigerators are tested for sound and temperature swings.
The tech center has three sound labs. When the inside door closes, the lab feels as though sound is being sucked out of the room.
“You can’t hear anything from inside there. All the pads on the outside are aerodynamic – meaning they are all a bunch of wedges stuck to the sides,” Strain said. “The bottom has about 18-foot-deep pillars drilled into the ground as a stationary pad. If a train goes by this thing, it will not feel any of that.”
When an appliance is tested, Strain says employees can detect where any sound from the appliance is coming from and adjust it accordingly.
Next are the temperature chambers that simulate various climate conditions, so refrigerators can be tested under various conditions. Each chamber is closed for the day, but a small window inside reveals empty white rooms.
Ryan Strain, design manager for refrigeration, walks through the electrical reliability lab in Whirlpool’s Technology Center on Monday. (Tony Wittkowski | HP Staff)
Past the electrical reliability lab is the prototype shop. This is where molds of Whirlpool products are made quickly and in-house, for testing. Next to some of the molds is a tall structure that isn’t very wide, but nearly touches the ceiling.
“This is our tool crib. It used to be a big room with an attendant who signed tools out to you,” Strain said. “Now you walk up, type in your user ID and password and ask for something. It automatically goes up and brings it down for you. The footprint it takes up is small compared to if it was an actual room.”
It’s essentially a mechanic’s over-sized vending machine, Strain says.
After being introduced to a room that holds eight 3-D printers and smells of heated nylon, I’m brought to the highest point of the tour – literally. We stand on the mezzanine, which offers a bird’s eye view of the maze I was just sent through. It’s on this perch that Strain fills me in on a secret.
“We spend a lot more time here than we do at home,” he said. “If you have to work in an office space, why not have it be something like this?”
Contact Tony Wittkowski at twittkowski@thehp.com or (269) 932-0358. Follow him on Twitter @tonywittkowski.
(Author’s Note: This article was originally published on June 30, 2015)
Tony Wittkowski 