McCarthy Building Cos. has completed the conversion of a decades-old building complex into a state-of-the-art headquarters and manufacturing facility for the family-owned Elliott Equipment Co.
Today, the 220,000-square-foot brick and concrete manufacturing facility is a showplace for the company. Located on 16 acres in southeast Omaha, Neb., it includes a 26,000-square-foot, 2-story office building originally built in 1982 and a 194,000-square-foot warehouse built in 1977. Elliott chose the facility to consolidate manufacturing operations that had been spread out across five buildings in different locations across Omaha.
“McCarthy was excited to work on this project because of its unique challenges,” says Ryan Sawall, vice president, Central Region for McCarthy Building in Omaha. “Although we could not have anticipated some of the unique construction and permitting issues we encountered, we maintained a close relationship with the Glazer brothers with regular weekly meetings and worked hard to resolve every issue, including suggesting some valuable cost-saving solutions. The result was a quality facility that everyone is proud of.”
Founded in Omaha in 1948, Elliott Equipment specializes in designing and manufacturing telescoping aerial work platforms, cranes and digger derricks. Elliott products are used by industry leaders in electrical and utilities construction, signage and lighting, public works, ports, mining and more. Elliott’s customers are located across North and South America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
Although the project officially broke ground in December 2018, various design and city permitting challenges delayed the active start of construction work until late summer 2019. Construction wrapped up in April 2020.
“Throughout construction, regular communications with McCarthy were key to the project’s success,” said Jim Glazer, president and CEO of the company he founded with his brother John Glazer of Elliott Equipment. “In addition to being straightforward, McCarthy also was resourceful in providing cost-effective solutions, including an innovative solution to a mechanical system problem, which ended up saving significant costs.”
For McCarthy, which has had a local office in Omaha for nearly 20 years and is one of the largest builders in the U.S., the project was an opportunity to collaborate with a locally owned company on a complicated project in a blighted area that would create more manufacturing job opportunities for Omaha workers.
The project, completed with zero safety incidents, included installing underground utilities and structural elements such as footings for cranes and structural steel without affecting existing underground utilities that lacked locations/documentation on previous as built drawings; creating seven new overhead door openings in existing post tension precast panels, including five at 16-feet tall by 24-feet wide and two at 16-feet tall by 16-feet wide; drilling core access holes in the existing post tension precast panels to fully grout each panel; and tying in new utilities into existing utilities that had exceeded their life span.
The extensively renovated space has created large open work areas conducive to manufacturing, assembling and testing Elliott’s products. Modern office space features extensive video conferencing capabilities, providing an ideal space to work with the company’s dealers and customers. The new manufacturing facility not only consolidates and streamlines Elliott’s operations, it features better lighting and air filtration and other employee amenities.
The new company headquarters proudly reflects Elliott’s brand image and supports the company’s plans to grow its business and create new jobs, including engineers, painters, welders, assembly workers and others during the next several years.