Tag Archives: structural steel fabrication

Meet Brian and Jaime Smith- “Responsibility Equals Accountability Equals Ownership”

“Responsibility Equals Accountability Equals Ownership. A sense of ownership is the most powerful weapon a team or organization can have.”
-Pat Summit, Former Tennessee Women’s Basketball Coach

We live in “what used to be” the beautiful city of Portland, Oregon. We used to take our kids down to the waterfront and spend the day playing tourist in our own city, but those days are long over. Our daughter ran a race downtown recently and we were in shock at the state of our city…garbage everywhere, human excrement on the sidewalks and in the flower beds, it was embarrassing. Yet most people were content to walk over the trash, to turn a blind eye to the sad state of what used to be one of the most beautiful cities in the country. Our take was that our communities have lost their sense of responsibility, accountability and ownership. We don’t have the solution to change these things, I wish we did, as I know many areas of the country face the same challenges.

However, we can make a promise to you that we run our organization like we run our family. We treat our facilities like we treat our own home. We are respectful, responsible and safe in how we operate and we also understand that our ability to perform directly reflects on you and your company when dealing with your customers. We are accountable to our customers and vendors. We keep our word and we do what we say we can do, when promised, and to your satisfaction. We value our employees and our facility and we take great care of the people and property around us. We take great pride in our responsibility of servicing you and great pride in the ownership of Albina Co., Inc.

We recently went on a family trip to Kona, Hawaii. We work extremely hard and we play extremely hard! We zip-lined for the first time! All of us went upside down and no hands over spectacular river gorges, water falls and lava tubes! The next day, we swam with dolphins in the wild and also came upon a pelagic manta ray measuring 8 feet wide that had never been spotted in the Hawaiian waters! The kids had the amazing pleasure of naming the manta ray “Freedom”!

We Have An Elevator Speech About Steel Bending!

Brian and I found ourselves in an elevator with Phil Knight, the co-founder and chairman emeritus of Nike, Inc., and we stood there in silence, when all we wanted to do was give him a 2 minute “elevator speech” about everything that is wrong with youth sports these days and how we wanted to partner with him to create a fun and positive environment for all kids involved in youth sports. We choked! But the good news is, if we were standing in an elevator with world-renowned architect, Frank Gehry, we would have a 2 minute elevator speech about Albina Co., Inc. and steel bending to blow his socks off!

Albina Co. is a small family-owned steel bending company founded in 1939. We are located in Tualatin Oregon (just south of Portland) and are able to service the entire United States and Canada from our single location!

If you have the opportunity to do business with Albina Co., Inc., I KNOW you will not be disappointed. Albina Co., Inc. is unique from other bending companies for a number of reasons:

•We have a full range of state of the art bending equipment allowing us to provide our customers with a one stop shopping experience for bending. We can bend any type of material (pipe, tube, plate and all structural members) and virtually any size of material (from the very small to the very large).

•When processing a job, generating a quote, or providing bending consultation we are looking to be part of YOUR TEAM and not just a vendor. Our staff is made up of experts that are not satisfied with “good enough”; our staff strives to exceed your expectations.

•For every job we process a knowledgeable project manager is assigned as your point of contact for the duration of your project. This project manager will always treat you with honesty and integrity and provide you with timely and accurate information.

•Every order we process will be confirmed back to you and it will be reviewed by two members of management (production and QC) BEFORE we start production. This ensures that the most accurate information is delivered to the shop for processing.

•We have developed our own custom in-house management software that helps us service you during every aspect of your project. In addition to our in-house management software we also offer bending calculators on our website to assist with complicated bending computations such as spiral bending math.

•Our customers are our best sales staff- we frequently hear from our customers that bent materials provided by Albina are in better condition, less distortion and dimensionally more accurate when compared to previous experiences with competitors.

We would love to partner with you on your next project. Do not let distance be a deterrent, consider us your “local” bending partner and see how working with Albina Co. is unmatched by other bending companies.

We Get It, You’re Busy!-That is Why We Value Your Time (Video Conferencing At It’s Best!)

As 2017 winds down, we would like to thank you for giving us the opportunity to serve you. We hope to have the pleasure of doing business with you for many years to come. As we reflect on the many relationships we built upon this past year, the very interesting and high-profile projects we have been a part of, as well as the challenges and obstacles we faced along the way, we are thankful that we had such a great customer base to share those experiences with. We are looking forward to a new year that will certainly bring its own set of adventures, but we are ready!

WE GET IT…YOU ARE BUSY! THAT IS WHY WE VALUE YOUR TIME. It seems anymore that there isn’t just a “busy time of year”, every day, throughout the entire year is busy! We get that you are being pulled in many different directions with work, family, fun activities, etc. That is why we want you to know that WE VALUE YOUR TIME and boy do we have a gift for you this holiday season!

The visionary concept of “videotelephony” was first popularized in the late 1870’s in both the United States and Europe. The first systems were developed by AT&T Corporation, first researched in the 1950’s, and failed mostly due to the poor picture quality and the lack of efficient video compression techniques.

Today’s video conferencing systems are no longer just for webinars. Albina has invested in a system that makes video conferencing as simple as one click in an email. Even if you do not have a camera on your end, our video call allows you to see our smiling face, while we both can talk like a telephone call. But it can go much further than that!

We can share our screen with you to review drawings
We can link you to our shop cameras so that you can see your job in progress
We can teach you how to use the calculations application inside our website
We are still learning how this can bring even more value AND respect your time.

Click on this YouTube Video to see a brief example of what we are now able to accomplish (and at the same time, receive my holiday well wishes via video!)

Never tried a video call? Drop us a line and we would be happy to show you.

AISC White Paper “The Impact of Material Selection on the Resilience of Buildings”

As part of AISC’s (American Institute of Steel Construction) mission to make sure that architects and developers have accurate and factual information regarding the design and construction of buildings and bridges, they have created a series of white papers exploring various issues related to specifying steel as the primary building material on projects. This month, I would like to highlight the white paper titled “The Impact of Material Selection on the Resilience of Buildings” which explains that of all the materials used for structural framing systems, structural steel has demonstrated the greatest level of resilience relative to extreme events, therefore reducing the cost of the risk associated with the ability of the structure to absorb and recover from the stress of an extreme event. Visit AISC for more detailed information and a link to read the full white paper. We also address many of these same issues on our own website in “Facts About Curved Steel” and in our “Top 10 Reasons to Specify Structural Steel.”

Meet Brian and Jaime Smith- “Be Part of the Experience (Part 1 of 2)”

Picture this…the first night of our family trip to New York City. We were sitting in a packed Carmine’s Italian Restaurant in the heart of Manhattan, enjoying the house red wine, the roar of the subway below us shaking our table every 2 minutes. All the great Italian meals you could think of and Jaime can’t have any of them as she tries to avoid gluten! She thinks about it for a minute and says “I am going to have some spaghetti and meatballs! I WANT TO BE PART OF THE EXPERIENCE!” And it was worth it for her to take that chance and do something out of her normal comfort zone, because it was an experience that we will never forget.

During dinner, we talked about this saying “I WANT TO BE PART OF THE EXPERIENCE” and realized that at Albina Co., Inc., WE PROVIDE AN EXPERIENCE FOR OUR CUSTOMERS. We are a full-service steel bending establishment and have every detail covered from the time we take your initial call to the time your bent material arrives on your door step. This is the EXPERIENCE you get when you work with us:

We reply to every RFQ (request for quote) received letting the customer know that we have the RFQ. If not already defined, we will ask when the bid is required. This will allow us to schedule our work flow to meet our customers needs.

Formal quotes are always prepared with great detail describing what the customer can expect from Albina if we are given an order. We never want the customer left to guess what they are going to receive from us.

Confirmations are always sent to the customer for their final review and records. Once a purchase order is issued to Albina your order is promptly entered so we can schedule your job and procure material timely.

Every order is reviewed by 3 levels of management (Scheduling, processing and QC). During review the details on a PO are confirmed to what has been entered on an Albina work order.

We ensure a promised due date is met by employing a full time scheduling manager. This scheduling manager assigns your project to a machine and to Albina workers. This is done very early in the flow of a project.

A project manager is assigned to every job that we process. The project manager will act as the point of contact for the customer regarding a project in process.

Proactive Communications. Project managers review the schedule daily and identify if a project is going to be completed after the promised due date. In the unlikely event a project is delayed for whatever reason, the customer is promptly notified.

All jobs are checked by QC upon completion and before they are turned in for shipping.

Savings via optimized shipping. The shipping manager schedules all of the daily trucks and ensures that projects are scheduled for trucks on or before the promised due date. Albina is frequently shipping all over the United States and Canada. The high volume of trucks allows our shipping manager to combine smaller orders onto a single truck saving our customers money.

Electronic tracking. After shipment, our shipping manager will email tracking information to our customer and emails MTR’s (if required) to our customer.

A follow up. Our job is not complete until you have your product and are completely satisfied. We view our customers as partners, and want open communications long after this order is concluded.

Next month in Part 2, we will share some of the ways we are investing to give you the ultimate ALBINA EXPERIENCE.

Brian and Jaime Smith- "Be Part of the Experience"

We recently took a family vacation to New York City, Gettysburg and Washington DC. We like to cover a lot of ground on vacations and take in as many sights as possible because we want “To Be Part of the Experience.” We walked almost 90 miles on this vacation to ensure that we saw everything! This particular day we started in Brooklyn, walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, through Tribeca in search of Taylor Swift (Of course! We have a 14 year old daughter!), through Soho and the East Village, ate pizza at the famous Bleeker Street Pizza, and ended in Times Square! What a day!

Meet Brian and Jaime Smith of Albina Co., Inc.-“If You Are Persistent, You May Get It. If You Are Consistent, You Will Keep It.”

STEADY & STABLE
I can’t tell you how many times I have had a customer tell me that they are going to have to pull business from us because they found a lower price supplier, that they are new to the steel industry and want to give someone else a try, that another supplier promised them a better delivery schedule or better quality. Whatever the reason, I always justify my price and schedule to the customer and then I tell them “We appreciate your business and our relationship, and we will be here for you when you need us.” The key word here is “when”, not “if.” I never have to justify the quality of our products or service, as both speak for themselves, and I can say with certainty that is not why we ever loose an account. A few weeks will go by, and guess what? I get a phone call that the new supplier can’t meet the delivery schedule, or that the product fails in comparison to what we were providing them, or they are going to go over budget for having to repurchase material and incur additional labor costs. And my response again is “We are here for you. What do you need?” Anyone can be persistent and promise you a better price, product or schedule to get your business, but can they be consistent and keep your business? Albina Co., is consistent, steady and stable. We have an extremely loyal customer base, and in the rare occasion that someone leaves, we almost undoubtedly always see them return.

Brian and Jaime Smith

Brian and Jaime love to explore the many amazing restaurants in the Greater Portland Metro area. They are foodies and love a good brunch or happy hour menu! This picture was taken at one of their favorite restaurants “Meriwether’s.” If you are in town, give us a call! We would love to introduce you to all the wonderful eats in PDX.

Albina is a Proud Supporter of the City of Tualatin’s ABC (America’s Best Communities) Initiative

In 2016, the City of Tualatin, Oregon was named a national finalist for the ABC award. Many local businesses, including Albina, supported the cause to help the City of Tualatin win the 3 million dollar grand prize. In April 2017, we learned that Tualatin did not win the 3 million dollar prize, but we know that the City of Tualatin is truly one of the best in the nation. Albina, and the steel bending and fabrication community is proud of the efforts that City officials and local businesses made to help make our city one of the best in the nation!

Cargo Heating Pipe Coils Bent for Barge Tanks

Albina is much more than just a structural bending facility. We service ALL industries that might require bent steel.
Recently Albina was involved with a large industrial application where we orovided Cargo Heating Pipe Coils for tanks in barges.

We were responsible for bending, trimming and washing each of the 488 lengths x 40 ft 2″ SCH40 SA106B SMLS to net 880 pcs. All bends were made to a 6” center-line-radius and our quality control department had to 100% QC parts to make sure the backwall thinning of the material was not below .079” and that ovality of the material was minimized.

After processing the first phase of this project the customer immediately placed 3 more releases as they were pleased with the quality, fair pricing, communication and customer service offered by Albina.