Building A Better Bond By Fibrebond

To support the nation’s critical infrastructure, Fibrebond couldn’t shut down during the pandemic. Halting operations, even for a short period, was not an option. Fibrebond’s Vice-President of Supply Chain and Manufacturing Support, Martee Gonsoulin, said the company had to act quickly to put procedures, safeguards and practices in place to ensure worker safety so that business could continue during COVID-19. “Early on, Louisiana was one of the hot spots for COVID-19," Gonsoulin said. "So, back in February, we began to dive in and look at the details of what would be needed to combat the pandemic, and, by the end of February/early March, we put in place policies we felt needed to happen to keep our folks safe.” Fibrebond continued to get policies and procedures in place through March before Louisiana's March 30 stay-at-home mandate. Gonsoulin credited her 20-plus years in pharmaceutical manufacturing for providing insight and much-needed experience in preparing for this unforeseen event. “All of the sudden, s

The data center industry was expecting 2020 to be a year of growth, said Hector Moreno. But Moreno, the Director of Business Development, Data Centers at Fibrebond, and his colleagues had no idea just how much growth that would be. The coronavirus pandemic sent everyone into their homes, with work, school and play all relying on home connections that ultimately relied on data centers firing on all cylinders. The projections for the year were going to be blown out of the water. “I think as soon as the pandemic hit, a lot of their acceleration and demand validated those initial plans,” Moreno said. “From a macro level, it’s really increased everybody’s pressure to build. In this space, there’s always sort of a push-pull, cart before the horse, if I build it will they come or just build it just in time, but our customers really want their space as soon as possible.” It’s a trend that seems unlikely to go away any time soon, even as regulations meant to stop the spread of COVID-19 begin to lift. With companies li

What do you do when boomtown and processing location are hundreds of miles away? If you’re Fibrebond, you devise a solution that involves floating a building with a name reminiscent of the Transformers down the Red River. It’s another example of how the business is looking to accommodate its customers’ needs. With liquified natural gas exports booming along the Gulf Coast and the recent discovery of natural gas, oil and natural gas liquids in the Permian Basin, customers have been looking for the best way to power their processes. MegaMod from Fibrebond gives them an option for single-piece building delivery, improving on previous iterations. “The key difference between MultiMod and MegaMod is that it’s obviously a lot bigger,” said Chet Carpenter, Fibrebond’s Business Development Manager. “The other is the delivery method. These, obviously, once they’re put together, can’t go down the road. (With) a MultiMod, each module is small enough to get on a truck, go to a site, get pieced together there and then inte

Fibrebond has solutions in several different markets; gensets, data centers, power, telecom, and more. With that diverse reach, it's critical for the company to not spread itself too thin and maintain high quality products and service regardless of the job. What is their secret sauce for pulling it off? On this episode of Building a Better Bond, we're joined by Chase Cook, who brings solutions to building client relationships at Fibrebond. Cook is the Director of Business Development for Fibrebond's Power division; he brings his diverse industry knowledge to Fibrebond to help the company position themselves as the industry’s experts. Relationships are a huge part of what Fibrebond does, and Cook said they have the experience to simplify projects their clients want to build. On this episode, he went into a little history of Fibrebond in order to explain where they are now. He said they used to be a telecommunications company but have expanded to oil, natural gas, packing generators, and more; with all the diff

Many industries can change, some seemingly overnight. Others can take years to complete their makeover. On this episode of Building a Better Bond, Randy Bogan, Warehousing Director for Fibrebond, sat down with Sean Heath to discuss the nature and rate of change in the industry. The nature of business is change, but that helps a company grow, according to Bogan. “You have to really be on your toes, now," he said. "There’s a lot going on daily. Time flies by. It’s very, very busy, and it’s just a lot going on with the product lines that we have.” After leaving the company for several years, although there may have been several product changes, the sense of family was there the moment he returned, Bogan explained. “We all like each other," he said. "We get along, because we know that, in order for Fibrebond to succeed, everyone has to succeed and do their job and do it correctly.”

Perspective is crucial for a good salesperson, especially if it includes the technical expertise of an engineer. On this episode of Building a Better Bond, a Fibrebond podcast, Sarah Clements, Technical Sales Representative for Fibrebond, sat down with Sean Heath to discuss the importance of flexibility and stability in the industry. The ability to look for a solution through the engineer’s eyes is an invaluable asset, according to Clements. “When I look at a floor plan, I can engineer: Well, if you move this piece of equipment 10 feet to the left, or switch here or switch it right, and you can decrease the cost for power circuits and all of these other things," she said. "That’s something that really helps when you’re talking about dollars and cents.” An engineer’s mindset also comes into play when a new design approach is needed for a unique challenge, Clements explained. “You have to look at the environmental factors, the soil conditions, the wind conditions, rain, the heat," she said. "You have to look a

On this Building a Better Bond jobcast, host Daniel Litwin was joined by Michael Hochstetler, Project Manager at Fibrebond, to discuss Fibrebond’s open Project Manager position. A Fibrebond Project Manager is the customer’s single in-house contact, who oversees all project-related tasks, and directs production from estimation to engineering. Daniel kicked off the discussion with a 30-second speed round where Hochstetler provided a quick overview of the key job points, i.e., job location, hours, days, travel requirements, years of experience needed, educational requirements, and career path expectations. Hochstetler next described the types of projects this position would typically work on, from small scale building projects, to the big picture, multi-modular building project. When asked by Daniel, what type of fictional character most embodies this project manager role, Hochstetler responded with Kevin Costner’s role in the movie Draft Day. The challenges that Costner’s character goes through in a single day,

The devastating ripple effect of an injury on the job can ultimately wreck business, and ruin livelihoods. It’s no wonder Fibrebond has invested heavily in workplace safety to avoid the ravages of an incident on the job. The steel and concrete corporation has implemented an approach known as “behavior-based safety,” a multi-layered program that has re-defined company safety culture and opened up an ongoing dialogue with employees. As a guest on this episode of Building a Better Bond, we learn how Fibrebond has embraced this strategy, and how other companies can too, with Martee Gonsoulin —Vice President of Supply Chain Manufacturing at Fibrebond. After watching her father incapacitated by a workplace injury, and suffering from a ski accident herself, Gonsoulin was all too familiar with the debilitating effects of being out of work. With over twenty-two years of experience in Pharmaceuticals manufacturing, Gonsoulin returned to the workforce at Fibrebond, using her comprehensive expertise to explore how workpl

Generator enclosures are evolving as the industry demands bigger, better, and more generator sets. In this episode of Building a Better Bond with Fibrebond, host Daniel Litwin sat down with Brett Dean, business unit director for Fibrebond, to break down the growth of genset solutions, why emergency and back-up generators are evolving, and how enclosure designs are evolving alongside them. Because data centers must have a continuous source of power, they rely on backup generators or generator sets when its primary power source goes down. But gensets are evolving as the high demand for data centers continues to skyrocket. “In the early 2000s, there were co-location providers. But now these large cloud service providers are the ones that I don’t think the market could have forecasted what their demand was going to be,” Dean said. As such, generator sets in the past decade have increased in size, fuel tank capacities, and unit quantities. Plus, there’s the demand for lower sound ratings with all these bigger, bet

To build data centers efficiently, safely, and inexpensively, manufacturers are turning to prefabrication as an accessible, trusted, and standardized solution. Faster, cheaper, and safer are all great reasons alone to use prefab units, but sustainability is a growing issue at stake. In this episode of Building a Better Bond with Fibrebond, host Daniel Litwin spoke about the emerging discussion of data center sustainability with Hector Moreno [contributor page], director of business development Data Centers for Fibrebond. The Louisiana-based company just wrapped up at Data Center Dynamics, or DCD, in San Francisco, a show that explores the intersection of future data center needs with sustainable infrastructure. "If you think about the sustainability of data centers, it doesn't get a lot of play nationally but in the future it will because we consume so much energy in data centers," Moreno said. "Energy isn't cheap. It's not an unlimited resource. So, how we use it and manage it will be very important." Tech g

Construction industry trends are causing a comeback for an age-old process: prefabricated construction. Not always a favorite within the industry, conceptions on prefabricated construction have slowly become more positive. Our guest today on this episode of Building a Better Bond explains why this is opening doors to safer, faster and cheaper construction. “With the original mindset thinking about conventional construction versus prefab, the first thing that goes through someone’s head is that prefab is a little shed in the backyard that’s holding a lawnmower,” Sean Black, business development manager at Fibrebond, said. “As the years have gone on, and people like me educating the industry and showing them we’re not talking about this little thin-gauge shed. We’re talking about a substantial building with a 14- to 11-gauge steel, heavy weight.” Black, a former electrician who’s been in the construction industry for more than 20 years, discusses what’s making this trend stick and what the advantages are over b

Many companies are designed with values and virtues in mind. Fibrebond, a leader in the manufacturing of mission critical structures, is no different, considering itself built on a firm basis of Christian faith. It’s embedded into the company’s and the city of Minden, Lousiana's culture, and actually had a significant influence on the founding of the company. To discuss how Fibrebond’s foundation of faith shapes the company, Durwin Adams, manufacturing supervisor and onsite chaplain, breaks down the company's decision to bring a chaplaincy program to their employees. Adams is also the senior pastor at Faith Memorial Baptist Church in Gibsland, Louisiana. “The founder of the company, Claud Walker, was led by the Lord to start the company and bring this business to the community of Minden. His Christian faith was a guiding principle in starting Fibrebond,” Adams said. And Adams knows about those beginnings, as he has been with Fibrebond his entire professional career and calls the company a “family environment”

Data is a powerful tool for many businesses, but collecting and analyzing it to drive change can be challenging. Especially in the manufacturing industry, where machinery and software pull an array of data points, how do you take that data and turn it into wins for your company? On today’s episode of Building a Better Bond, we’re joined by Nathan George, Director of Manufacturing Analytics & Optimization at Fibrebond. George, although relatively new at Fibrebond, has a long history of working with data in manufacturing and using it to optimize efficiencies, which on the plant floor can be tricky. “When collecting data on the plant floor, it can’t be a burden to employees. It has to be seamless,” he said. He also shared where many companies run into problems with data. “Usually the problems that companies run into is not gathering holistic data or not collecting data over a long enough span of time. You can’t usually understand the story without at least a month of data.” While George has only been analyzi

Claud Walker, Founder and Chairman of the Board of Fibrebond, a company that builds innovative and reliable structures that protect people and mission critical equipment, has hired hundreds of people over the course of his career. There could not be a more aptly named business for Walker, who believes that people are everything and that the bond is the most important part of becoming successful company. His family, in the sawmill business since 1848, migrated to Louisiana in the early 1920s because of the abundance of pine trees in the region. The Walker family has been through a lot of hardships in its almost 200 years in business, and has faced many obstacles throughout the years. It is all part of the ups and downs of work and life, according to Walker. “You just take what the good Lord gives you and you go from there,” Walker said. Wanting to carve his own path, Walker established Fibrebond in the mid-80s. Not long after, Fibrebond was met with its first potentially company-ending challenge. In 1999

Today’s Careers Podcast explores the position of Design Engineer at Fibrebond we speak with Stephanie Jordan, Director of Marketing & Employee Development at Fibrebond to learn more about the hands-on, creative and personable role. Along with the basics, you'll get to hear Jordan: describe why Tony Stark would flock to this job, compare Fibrebond to a film's opening sequence, and highlight what makes Fibrebond stand out among its competitors.

As data usage continues to grow across all industries, the need for efficiency increases exponentially. That trend is having a profound impact on the construction side of data centers. On today’s podcast, our host had a chance to speak with Hector Moreno, the Director of Business Development Data Centers for Fibrebond. They discussed a few challenges on the construction side of these mission-critical buildings, the varying rules that each state develops, how environmental factors are a basic part of design, and a relatively new approach to deployment of a custom solution.