Watts recently held a grand-opening event for its new Watts Works Learning Center in St. Pauls, North Carolina.
The grand-opening gala included tours of both the company’s St. Pauls manufacturing facility and the new learning center. More than 250 individuals attended, including sales representatives, employees, local dignitaries, North American trade media members and other invited guests.
The new learning center allows customers, channel partners, sales representatives, employees and other visitors to obtain hands-on classroom training for a wide range of Watts products and solutions, including Watts Dead Level trench drain; Watts specification drainage (roof drains, carriers); Orion chemical waste pipe and drains; Watts Rain Cycle system; Mueller Steam Specialty; FEBCO/Watts backflow prevention and Ames backflow preventer; Watts automatic control valve; Powers Intellistation; PVI water heater; Watts OneFlow anti-scale system; BLUCHER HygienicPro and Orion pipe fusing.
“Our primary focus here is drains--there's a little more emphasis,” Watts’ Mark Hamilton told BNP Media Plumbing Group Editorial Director Mike Miazga during a video interview at the grand-opening event. “All our Watts products are available for training in the lab and our factory here.”
The 3,000-square-foot learning center contains a demonstration lab, configurable classroom and working product displays that showcase Watts’ products in action.
This is the third Watts Works Learning Center, joining locations in North Andover, Massachusetts and Woodland, California. The St. Pauls center is located within the 210,000-sqaure-foot Watts St. Pauls manufacturing facility.
“This enables us to get much closer to our customers,” Hamilton said. “The whole focus is to interact with our customers and learn from them. It’s a great venue for that. Our customers get great value by learning about our products and new applications and we get feedback from them on new ideas we can bring to the market.”
Hamilton added the facility caters to customers throughout the supply chain regardless of level of expertise.
“They can expect a brand-new curriculum primarily focused on hands-on activities,” he said. “We want to spend as little time in front of Power Point and more time in our lab getting our hands dirty working with products. They can expect to meet with subject-matter experts and can expect a varied curriculum we’ve developed for people brand-new to the industry all the way up to advanced-level discussions. We have a broad-breadth of products and a curriculum for different levels. We've tailored it to contractors where there is a little different focus compared to engineers and wholesalers, and we've tailored it to those audiences as well.”
Video: View Hamilton’s entire interview talking about the new St. Pauls Learning Center.
