Profile Park: Cook’s newest facility

What was once a General Electric (GE) refrigerator manufacturing plant, will become a state-of-the-art manufacturing space for Cook Medical after an extensive renovation process. Named Profile Park, the facility is located in Bloomington, less than a mile away from our global headquarters at Park 48. Profile Park will include some high-volume continuous flow lines, as well as office space for some global functions. While specific plans have not yet been determined for who will move and when, the building will likely be ready for the first teams in late 2020.

Plans for Profile Park

Brad Boring, the Cook Architecture and Engineering project manager for Profile Park, has been at Cook for about eight months now. Previously he was a local contractor for 20 years, and he did quite a bit of work with Cook during that time. He had some unique insights to offer on the facility and the long-term goals that go along with it.

“Progress is going really well. For September, we will have wrapped up with interior demolition. By the end of October, we should be finished pressure washing the entire inside of the building. Put-back, or the brand-new construction, could start as soon as January.”

After this, the plan is to work towards completing the validation of the facility, followed by the moving in of equipment and supplies, and, eventually, the moving in of employees.

Throughout all of the demolition at Profile Park, Brad and his team have strived to remain as environmentally friendly as possible. This includes a great deal of reusing and repurposing materials salvaged during the demolition process.

“We have recycled over 2.5 million pounds of metal during demolition so far,” he said. “We will mill all of the asphalt from the parking lots at the facility and have it repurposed into new asphalt. A majority of that will be used for local interstate projects, like I-69. We’ll also wind up making close to 20,000 tons of stone materials out of the concrete and block around the property that we will reuse or repurpose as well.”

The development of this new facility has allowed the architects and design specialists to explore new avenues of design.

“It will be unlike any Cook building you have seen,” Brad said, “The exterior will be clad with limestone and metal panels. The idea is for it to have a very modern and industrial look, inside and out.”

The current plans also include having features like an outdoor campus with a park-like feel. The facility will have a walking path that will loop around campus, as well as outdoor seating spaces. Profile Park will also have a rooftop patio for employees to get some fresh air and collaborate outside. Glass will be incorporated into the external walls as much as possible to allow natural light and views of outside into the office area. There will also be a kitchen, a cafeteria, and a fitness center on location.

Below are some of the photos taken by Doug Wright and me of the construction progress at Profile Park  along with a selection of renderings that represent some of the current plans for Profile Park as of September 2018. They include designs for the facility’s exterior and interior main entrance, as well as the employee entrance, the rooftop garden view, and an aerial view of the campus. These designs are subject to change. Following these photos, there is a video of the demolition of a tower on site.

 

An open house was held at Profile Park to showcase some of the progress with this project. A great deal of demolition work has happened since early April, and a lot of what once was a GE refrigerator manufacturing plant is hardly recognizable now.

One Cook employee who volunteered at the open house had a very interesting story to share about his past experience with the facility. Kyle Massey is a team lead on the Complaint Investigation team in Quality Engineering at Park 48. He started at Cook three and a half years ago, but before that, he worked at the GE facility as a business team leader.

“People asked me when I came from GE to Cook what the differences were, and I would say, ‘The processes at GE were dirty compared to what we do here and the air conditioning works at Cook.’ It’s a whole different world here, a different type of manufacturing,” Kyle said. “When I heard about the open house, I thought it sounded like a neat opportunity to go and see the progress for myself, and to maybe even share some of what I remembered of the factory and the different processes of the day-to-day operations at GE. I didn’t know what we would see, or what we would be able to look at, so I was interested to see how it had changed. It was neat looking at some of the photos at the open house because there were before photos that would show doors leading to a second story, and after photos showing how it looks nothing like that now.
You could see in some of the pictures how they took out mezzanines and entire floors.”

Below are some of the photos taken by Doug Wright and Rick Phillips at the Profile Park open house, that was held on September 11^th.

For some added fun, there are a few 360 videos from the construction process below. You can click and drag your mouse around to experience all angles of the 360 view.