One Call is All That Was Needed

I spent the early part of my career working at Thomasville Furniture as an Industrial Engineer. I was responsible for supporting our veneer plant. One of the most valuable lessons I learned from my time in this role was a stark example of never, ever overlooking the simple or the obvious – in this case a single phone call could have saved 18 months of work from being. Here’s the story.

In furniture, veneer is used to create a unique look on the surface of the furniture, which would be impossible with solid wood. In many cases, veneer panels are stronger and more stable than solid wood. The veneered surface is glued to an inner core to create a “sandwich” of wood plies. This is where the term plywood comes from.

To make patterns, slices of wood are placed side by side with tape applied at the edges to hold them together, prior to gluing to the core board. After gluing, the tape is sanded off. This reduces the thickness of the veneer. Although the surface is thinner, the bond is stronger, as the tape has equalized the moisture in all the types of wood prior to gluing, resulting in a very stable and strong surface.

It always bothered me that we had to sand the expensive veneer surface after the plywood was formed, but I was assured that there was no loss of strength or durability of the veneer surface.

One day, I was invited to a meeting at our corporate offices. An R&D team from our parent company, Armstrong World Industries, had traveled to North Carolina to show us a breakthrough technology that they said was going to revolutionize the veneering process.

Seated around a conference table, we were introduced to three scientists who supported us from Armstrong’s corporate office in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Most of us had never met them or heard about them, but they had been working on a veneer project for one and a half years.

They worked on an idea to eliminate the need to tape the veneer together prior to gluing to the core board. They used a sonic adhesion technique. They thought that by eliminating the tape, we could eliminate the need to sand the veneer and keep things stronger and more stable. This would also reduce the labor required to produce the finished products.

They gave us a demonstration of the sonic attachment method. Then they asked if we had any questions. Our veneer buyer asked if they understood the benefits of taping and how it equalized the moisture content of the different species of wood as they were spliced together. The R&D team looked puzzled and asked for more information. He told them if the moisture content wasn’t equalized, the different veneer species would grow and shrink at different rates, due to their natural moisture content. This would be most problematic during the gluing process.

The R&D team members looked dejected at this point. Then, one of the other members of the Thomasville team asked them if they had ever called anyone at the furniture company. They hadn’t. At that moment they realized they had wasted 18 months of effort. If they had just placed one phone call, they would have found out a critical detail, which would have changed the course of their project entirely!

They took their equipment and samples and went home. We never heard from them again. The lesson in all of this is to communicate with your customer and learn critical details about their process, rather than assuming you know more than you do.