We, at CONICA, have all types of customers for playground and fitness flooring applications: flooring installers, play equipment manufacturers, construction companies and area manager or owners, but this article is destinated to those of my readers who are installers of rubber flooring for playgrounds and leisure applications. Perhaps you have already decided about this issue at some point in your history.
As some of you know, I have worked for many years in the operations area of one of the leading worldwide manufacturers of playgrounds and outdoor fitness spaces and in recent weeks this issue of installers services has come up in conversation with several people and I reminded my times at that position. I will talk about it in today’s article.
Playground equipment manufacturers may have their own personnel for activities as groundwork, play equipment installation and safety surfacing installation but this is not usually the case in major part of them. Mostly they have been outsourcing some or all these services to other independent contractors.
Although the installation of a playground or a fitness area is a relatively short construction job, coordinating groundwork activities, assembly and installation of play equipment and installation of safety surfacing, if they are carried out by different companies, is a bit difficult for manufacturers, that trend to have limited resources for job coordination or project management.
Safety surfacing can only be done when playground equipment is fully assembled and installed and before that, groundwork must be correctly finished with the ground levelling and compaction, foundation holes, borders and drainage systems completed.
If you have agreed for a safety surfacing crew to travel to the job site and start one day and there are delays in some of the previous jobs due to weather issues (quite common) or any other reason, somebody has an extra cost or waste a job slot, and nobody wants to be the one to undertake this extra cost.
Play equipment manufacturers will usually prefer to have a single installer for the full service and I was always looking for this kind of company in all the geographical areas that were under my responsibility.
I know each activity is a different speciality and you might need different people for some of these activities and some additional licenses, tools and machinery, but if your main customers are play equipment manufacturers, I believe you would become a more valuable supplier for near all your customers.
I can remember some cases where the safety surfacing installer was claiming that a defect on the rubber flooring was, in fact, created by a bad drainage or incorrect ground compaction. If you do the full service, you have, of course. no option anymore to claim about others job and you become fully responsible of the total quality of the site.
Groundwork main requirements are licenses, experience and some machinery for excavation, demolition, surveying, ground levelling and compaction as well as several other specific tools.
Assembly and installation of small and mid-size Play equipment is a bit as assembling IKEA furniture. If you read carefully and follow the instructions and you are well organized in the unpacking and distribution of the different pieces, you will not miss a single screw and do the assembly correctly at first try, but not everybody has the skills and competences for this. Assembly of bigger play structures and Robinia wood equipment may be a fully different story and you might need to have or rent cranes and heavy lifters and have different skills. In both cases you will need to have people trained by the equpment manufacturer.
Are you ready to offer a wider service or do you prefer specialisation in your wetpour segment? Feel free to comment.
Take care
Rubberman Blog 