As anyone who enjoys a good meal will tell you, the ingredients found in a recipe can either make or break the dish. That same philosophy can be applied to businesses — the “ingredients” of a company can either allow it to be successful or unsuccessful. Jim White IV, president of JJ White Inc., is confident that the ingredients found at his company — service, size and safety — have created a successful organization that has become a leader in industry.

For more than 80 years, JJ White Inc. has brought excellence to industry by providing its clients with quality service, a large work force and safe work practices. According to White, these three things have allowed the company to bring a unique blend to the wide variety of projects JJ White has completed for companies such as Merck & Co., Chevron, BP, Rohm & Haas Co., Shell and Kimberly-Clark.

Since being founded in 1920 as a mechanical contractor in Philadelphia, JJ White has evolved into a single-source, multitrade contractor with experience in a wide range of disciplines.

Today, the company consists of five groups — General Construction/Construction Management, Mechanical Construction, HVAC Services, Exchanger Operations, and API Tank Construction and Repair. With a commitment to quality, service and safety, each group serves a variety of industries, including petrochemical, pharmaceutical, healthcare, commercial, institutional and academic.

A ‘one-stop shop’ in industry
According to White, the company’s evolution into a multitrade contractor started in the 1950s when White’s father, Jim White III — who was president of JJ White at the time — started to become interested in general contracting work after working on several multiprime contract jobs and after performing concrete installations at industrial facilities for 20-30 years.

“That is what got my father started in pure general building construction where he functioned as a general contractor,” White said.

In the 1980s, JJ White diversified its service offerings and expanded into HVAC and pharmaceutical sterile activities, which, White said, was a natural extension of the company’s mechanical work.

The HVAC Service Group has the history and experience to craft a solution for all of a client’s HVAC needs. The company’s skilled and qualified employees have worked with both installation and maintenance projects in both large and small venues for a wide range of customers, including several Fortune 500 companies in the pharmaceutical and heavy industrial markets, as well as many smaller companies that utilize JJ White’s outstanding maintenance services. The company’s versatility and experience ensures that its work force can resolve a client’s HVAC needs.

In 2002, JJ White branched into its first additional service offering beyond general mechanical and HVAC contracting and started the Exchanger Group.

“The Exchanger Group was a natural extension of what we had been doing in the refineries for years — pulling and cleaning bundles and then replacing them,” White said.

Ed Ducey, a JJ White vice president who oversees the Exchanger Group, said that with the addition of this service, JJ White’s customers are no longer required to hire multiple contractors, which makes for a seamless project.

“We now have the capability to do the entire project turnkey, and the owners now have a single contractor who can assume full accountability for maintenance and turnaround projects,” Ducey said.

Predominantly exchanger maintenance oriented, the Exchanger Group offers a “cafeteria-style menu” of services to its clients including blind-to-blind turnkey services, pull/clean/push services and clean only services.

The fifth and final group — the API Tank Repair and Construction Group — was founded in 2006. With more than 65 people working in the field and a management team with a combined 150 years of experience strictly in the tank business, JJ White’s tank group has the experience and personnel to handle any project.

“We perform two types of services — tank repair per API 653 code and the design, fabrication and construction of new tanks per API 650 code,” Tom Callahan, vice president of tank operations, said.

For the repair work, the API Tank Repair and Construction Group performs the design and installation for a wide variety of projects. For the new construction of tanks, the group handles the design, fabrication and the actual field erection of the tanks.

“We perform services on all types of tanks that need to be repaired, such as product storage tanks, chemical and petrochemical tanks, and water and wastewater tanks,” Callahan said.

According to Callahan, the addition of the tank group to JJ White’s already extensive range of services now provides the company’s clients with a “one-stop shop in industry.”

“We can now perform the tank repair and construction work, as well as the concrete work and any mechanical piping work that goes along with the tanks,” he said.

Demonstrating its quality management systems throughout all divisions, JJ White is proud to be both ISO 9001/2000 and ISO 140001 compliant.

Focusing on customer satisfaction with quality service
As a family-owned company for four generations, White and his predecessors have taken the approach of operating the company with a personal, hands-on style of doing business and have excelled in establishing a company that is centered on customer satisfaction. With a commitment to quality service and an attention to detail, White is proud to point out that his company has never lost a customer due to dissatisfaction.

“That doesn’t mean that we have never made a mistake,” White said. “It just means that when there has been a problem, either myself or the management team gets involved and rectifies the situation.”

For White, customer service is a top priority at the company and is something that should be taken very seriously. To make sure his customers are pleased with the work being performed by the company, White and his management team have a number of internal and external verifications that are put in place during each project.

“We try to check in with our clients before the project to ensure that we know what their expectations are,” he said. “We also try to verify with the client during and at the conclusion of the project to see if we met those expectations. If we did not meet those expectations, then we find out what we need to do to improve our service for our next performance.”

In addition, White and his management team also receive continual customer feedback through project managers, weekly and monthly meetings, customer satisfaction surveys and outside consultants who contact clients independently to see how they feel about the company’s performance.

Operating with an experienced work force
Employing approximately 1,500 highly skilled craftsmen and supervisors full time, JJ White is able to utilize its own work force on projects, thereby giving customers a range of benefits that include single-source accountability, flexible scheduling and safe, on-time completion.

Even with the much-publicized shortage of skilled laborers in industry, JJ White is able to maintain an extensive work force that is thoroughly trained in JJ White’s safety and quality systems, which enables the company to provide a safe and productive service to the customer.

“The ability to maintain a stable work force gives JJ White the time required to educate workers with the necessary skills to safely and productively execute projects,” Ducey said. “Having this capability of maintaining a stable work force provides security for the craftsmen, stability for the company and quality supervision for the owner.”

With supervisors who average 20 years at the company, White pointed out that JJ White’s work force is also able to bring a level of consistency and experience that is unmatched in industry.

“The hidden attribute to our large work force is one that surrounds dedication and service,” White said. “With our large group of steady people, we are able to consistently bring a dedication to the client’s time and money, which ultimately benefits the client.

“When we supply manpower to the job, it’s more than just a ‘call and response.’ We feel that the size and constancy of our work force and our supervision gives us the knowledge and the best use of people.”

Having the available work force also allows JJ White to man its own fabrication shop, which helps get projects done on a more timely basis, White said.

“Because it is our people in the fabrication shop, they know where our priorities are,” he said. “We don’t have to call a sub and beg them to put us on the top of their list because we are working on a short deadline. We can just load our people in and satisfy the scheduled needs for the client.

“Whether it’s an emergency or changes during the course of a project, we can adjust our schedule to meet that need. Having the fabrication shop and work force makes us more adaptable and responsive.”

By having its own work force and fabrication shop, White said the company is able to maintain fewer handoffs during the execution of a project, which helps create a better end result.

“When there are fewer handoffs, there is less potential for errors and better communication,” he said. “And with better communication comes better quality, safety and execution.”

In addition, many of the project managers, vice presidents and pipe fitters have “come up the ranks” within the company and more than likely have spent time in the pipe fabrication shop, so they are aware of the advantages the fabrication shop offers.

“With the experienced work force and our own pipe fabrication shop that is dedicated to JJ White’s clients, we can bring a vast amount of knowledge and experience to our clients,” Jack Burke, vice president of JJ White’s Mechanical Group, said.

Safety — A culture, philosophy at JJ White
For White, safety isn’t just a priority at the company; it’s a culture and philosophy that employees must adopt early on. That philosophy has allowed the company to complete its best safety year ever in 2007 by completing almost 3 million man-hours with an OSHA recordable incidence rate of 0.2.

Although safety has always been important, JJ White aimed to improve its safety record in 1999 when it rolled out the C-change initiative, which was created to change the safety culture, challenge the company’s past practices and certify that each day was going to be recordable- and incident-free.

“That really got us on the tremendous track of safety improvement that we work hard to remain on every day,” White said.

To stay on that track of safety, JJ White employs a full-time staff of 15 safety professionals. In addition, the company holds twice weekly “tool box talks” and has regular “safety standdowns,” which means that if management sees an issue that could be a potential hazard, they take some time to talk to their employees about those particular trends. Other safety programs JJ White has incorporated into the company are safety incentive programs and the use of job safety analysis (JSA) cards.

According to Callahan, JJ White is a firm believer in using JSA cards. For each task that a foreman is going to perform with his crew, he must fill out a JSA card, he said.

“JSA cards prompt the foreman, as well as the workers, to be interactive and to think about the project and what the potential dangers could be,” Callahan said.

“The JSA cards are preventative planning tools that require the work force to get all the aspects of the job and plan it out to plan for safety,” White added. “Safety planning is nothing more than good planning.”

Recently, JJ White established a new safety program called “live JSA audits.”

“Project managers will show up on the job and will review the JSA card with the workers, audit it, comment on it and then report back to our safety manager,” Burke said. “We find this to be very helpful, and it gives us a lot of feedback from the field.”

Senior management at JJ White also believe that in order for workers to go home in the same condition they came to work in, safety must start with a commitment from the top. According to White, each senior manager, including him, attends several safety seminars that discuss the latest trends in safety.

“On an annual basis, the supervision gets a minimum of 40 hours of training and education, but we try to get them closer to about 160 hours,” White said.

White also wants his craftspeople to participate in safety education and requires them to complete at least 24 hours of safety education each year.

“It’s a complicated world, and there are a lot of things to know and understand,” White said. “We try to be sure that our employees know what measures need to be taken to ensure something is done safely.”

JJ White’s clients have appreciated the company’s dedication to safety and how it relates to their bottom line.

“They [our clients] are impressed with our commitment, and especially with our commitment from the top,” Burke said. “A lot of the owners we’re working for are graded, scored and driven by their safety record, so safety performance is important.”

White has also heard employees mention the company’s dedication to safety, and he views that as a major accomplishment.

“It encourages and drives me to know that what we are doing is right, well founded and just,” he said. “I know that we are doing the right thing because I hear our employees say that while their previous employer talked about safety, they didn’t do things to back it up and promote safety. It makes me feel good that we do that here at JJ White.”

Because of the company’s commitment to safety, it has been honored with several safety awards, including the NPRA Meritorious Safety Performance Award; the PENNSAFE Award for Safety Excellence, an award presented annually to Pennsylvania companies that are the safest in their respective industries; and The Association of Union Contractors Thomas J. Reynolds Safety Award, which recognized JJ White for working 1.6 million man-hours without a recordable injury or incident.

“Safety is very crucial in the operations of JJ White,” White said. “We value the health of our stakeholders and always place it as a top priority, and we are very proud of these recognitions.”

Providing excellence in the future
As new industries emerge and established industries evolve, JJ White will continue to provide its clients with quality service, an experienced work force and a commitment to safety.
 
JJ White invites you to look at the company’s range of experience and see how it can help you in the construction, expansion, modernization or maintenance of your facilities.

For more information, visit www.jjwhiteinc.com or call (877) JJ-WHITE [559-4483].