Buying Office Cubicles - Our Take!

Value Engineering Office Cubicles

What is value engineering, you ask?  Value engineering is the process of reviewing a space plan for office cubicles to make sure that the parts and pieces selected give you the maximum value for your money.  All Maxon Furniture space planners are trained in this process and can save you thousands of dollars without impacting the functionality of the workstations for your organization. 

Here are some of the key elements in value engineering:

Electrical Raceways in Office Panels: Make sure that you only get electrical systems, outlets, and panels with raceways where you need them.  Typically it will be less expensive to run the electrical system only in the panels between the workstations so that the system is shared.  Maxon and some other manufacturers make special non-raceway office panels.

Acoustical and Tackable Office Panels:  Usually office panels come in a variety of different constructions.  Features include tackability (the ability to put thumb tacks in the panel) and special acoustical sound deadening materials.  Only specify tackable panels where your employees need and will use them.  If you have policies against putting things on walls; save your money.  Regarding acoustics, research has shown that the type of panels in your office cubicles has very little impact on the sound in your office compared to the type of carpet or ceiling tiles around you. This is another area where you can save some money.  

Office Panel Fabric Selection:  Office panel fabrics come in multiple grades.  Find the lowest grade fabric that will meet your aesthetic needs. 

Height of Office Panels: Using panels of various heights will make your office more attractive, more inviting to your employees (no cubicle farm here), and save you money.  A 54" high panel provides privacy for a seated worker.

Worksurface Sizes and Shapes: Make sure that your spaceplanner uses the largest sizes of worksurface to assemble your station.  These will require less hardware, less installation time and will be lower in cost.  Your employees will benefit from fewer worksurface seams that get in the way. 

Overhead Storage Options: Overhead storage cabinets with doors are usually standard on office cubicles.  But do you really need them?  If security is not an issue, and most people have their doors open all of the time, then why not request open shelves instead. They offer considerable cost savings.

And lots more:   A skilled space planner can advise you on how to use the proper size lighting, minimize the hardware used for assembly, use legs on the ends of worksurfaces instead of panels, and minimize the cost of the electrical system. 

Before ordering office cubicles, make sure that you get all of the features that you want and only the features that you need!  You'll hit your objectives and stretch your budget! 

Glass may be the clear choice for your Office Cubicles!

  Yes, it's true, office cubicles don't have to be covered with grey fabric!  At Maxon, we offer fabric in hundreds of colors, textures, and patterns.  We also offer hard-surface laminate from Wilsonart® and glass in our office panels.  Glass may be the best choice of all, as it makes a cubicle not a cubicle. How does it do this?

We can put glass in virtually any part of an office panel, but it is commonly used "above the worksurface."  It can be substituted for fabric in our office panels and is available in clear, tinted, or textured versions. Clear glass helps to block sound, give a sense of privacy, and let natural light through. It prevents that claustrophobic feeling some people get sitting in a traditional cubicle. Furthermore, clear glass goes with everything and is never out of style.

Textured glass may be an even better choice for many organizations. Textured, or translucent, glass delivers on three counts. It offers visual privacy, blocks sound, and lets natural light in. It really helps do what cubicles have been trying to do since their introduction- provide privacy and openness at the same time.  Although glass is slightly more expensive than a regular panel, the visual difference, the resulting increase in productivity, and the retention of your workforce is sure to justify the upcharge. Glass just may be the clear choice for you. 

How are Office Cubicles like Lego®?

  When most people think about office cubicles, they envision rows of gray cubes lined up in a grid pattern.  But cubicles are not really made or sold as whole units. Rather, they are sold as parts and pieces-in this case panels, worksurfaces and storage units. Sound confusing?  Well, just think about Lego.

In the past, Lego was sold in great big boxes of multi-colored blocks with 2, 4, or 8 connections per block. It was left up to the user's imagination and ingenuity to create a car, a castle, or the latest transformer from these parts and pieces. But the clever makers of Lego realized that not all people could envision the finished creations they could make from these parts and pieces. So, they started to create specific finished creations and include the parts and pieces for that model in each individual box (which also showed exactly what the finished creation would look like). Thus, anyone could visualize what they could make from Lego and, if they needed, follow specific instructions for assembly. 

Cubicles are quite similar.  We, in the industry, see cubicles, or systems furniture, as a collection of parts and pieces-office panels, worksurfaces, files, and overhead storage. Each of these comes in various shapes, sizes, and colors. They can be combined into virtually thousands of combinations in terms of final cubicle size, shape, and aesthetics. This can all be quite confusing to you, the buyer. One solution is to hire an Interior Designer to put all of these parts and pieces together for you and draw a picture of what it will look like when they are all done.

At Maxon, we have two other unique answers- our Inspirations program and Maxon-in-a-Click.  Inspirations is a step-by-step selection process that allows you to choose the size, shape, options, and colors for your office with visual guides every step of the way. By making a few choices at a time, the process is much less intimidating. Order our Inspirations Guide and see just how easy it is. Maxon-in-a-Click makes it even easier. Just pick from 1 of 7 pre-configured cubicle and desk workstations, and choose a color from 1 of 3 combinations-and that's it! Our Maxon-in-a-Click program is available from our dealers and will soon be available in catalogs through the country.

We make buying office furniture as easy as buying Lego!

Why can selecting colors for your office cubicles be so challenging?

  We find that our customers often get stuck in the office furniture buying process at the color selection stage. Why is this? It stems from the nature of office cubicles and the evolution of the office furniture selection process. When you buy an expensive car, you usually have the choice of 2 or 3 interior pallets or sometimes none at all, as the palette is pre-selected to complement the exterior color of the car. So what's up with office cubicles, and how can color selection be made easier?

First, most office cubicles today are covered with fabric. Most of us are not accustomed to vertical walls covered with fabric and the myriad of choices in weave, color, and texture that go along with it. For vertical walls, we are accustomed to selecting paint color-usually off-white is a safe choice for offices. But fabric covering gives office cubicle panels the ability to have a tackable surface and to absorb sound. Maxon cubicle panels can also be covered with high-pressure laminate if you want a hard surface or alternate look. This material has primarily been developed for horizontal surfaces and comes in hundreds of colors-from solids to wood grains and various rock-like textures. But given these materials, why offer them in so many options. Why not simplify things?

The explanation for this stems from the evolution of the cubicle panel system itself. Cubicles were first developed for large businesses that constructed buildings to accommodate large numbers of employees. This required the services of architects and designers to design the space and select interior colors, including panel colors. The designers' extensive training and creative nature led them to ask the panel manufacturers for the latest colors, textures, and weaves of fabric in order to create unique and beautiful workspaces. The manufacturers responded, over time, by offering hundreds of options for these interior designers. And these options are customarily offered to everyone, making color selection more complicated than it needs to be. 

At Maxon, we see the office cubicle as a palette of colors, textures, and weaves. We have selected all of our material color options to work with one another. In fact, through our Inspirations program, we have worked with interior designers to pre-select 20 color palettes that should meet the needs of almost all customers. These can easily be viewed on our Color Selector and customized if you can't find the exact combination for your office. We've gone back to basics when it comes to selecting colors for your office cubicles. 

 

   Because choosing colors shouldn't make you see red!

Office Cubicles – The Love-Hate Relationship

If you want to make an office furniture industry employee twitch, just mention the word "cubicles." Why is that? Well, in part, you can blame Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. You see, that comic strip takes the cubicle and makes it the symbol of all that is crazy and twisted in corporate America. Cube farms are all the same, according to Dilbert, and they suck away our individuality, reinforcing the truth that we are all just a number.

As funny as Dilbert is, the comic just might be missing the whole point. Cubes (or as we like to call them in the industry-workstations, systems furniture, or panel systems) can be a cost -effective way to organize your office and keep that precious balance between privacy and teamwork.

If you ask most people what kind of office they want, they'll tell you "a corner office with a door and windows overlooking a beautiful pond that gets the afternoon sun."  The only problem is that buildings only have 4 corners (the CEO always gets one of them), and limited window exposure. The cost, in terms of construction and real estate, to provide everyone with a private office would be prohibitive for most organizations. So what's the answer? In the 1950's and 1960's, organizations placed 10, 20 or 30 desks in a big room-with no privacy, no storage space, and no way to concentrate.  Times change, however, and in the 1960's, the cubicle was born. 

The well-designed cubicle provides the appropriate level of visual privacy (high or low walls) and some auditory privacy (better than the open office). It also offers personal space and storage for both work and personal items above and below a working surface. A cubicle just might be the closest you will get to a private office for everyone in the organization. And cubicles offer an openness that can foster teamwork and more open communication. So, love them or hate them, they may be your best option. Maybe we need to learn to at least "like" them. 

How much are my Office Cubicles going to cost?

For most purchases this is a pretty simple question, but for Office Cubicles this can be a challenging one.  How do you budget for an office move, add-on or expansion if you can't get at least a rough idea of the cost?  A few practices in the office furniture industry make this a more difficult task.  First, as in many industries, list price is not an accurate reflection of selling price.  Manufacturers, with their dealers, have different discount structures - from 0-50% off of list price is common.  Second, office cubicles are not a stock, off-the-shelf item.  Each project will vary in size, height, material choices, filing, and accessories to name but a few of the myriad of variables that create literally thousands of combinations. This makes setting "the price" difficult.  Third, typically when you buy more workstations there are more "shared" walls and the price for each workstation goes down a little bit.  Thus, the price for a station varies by the size and layout of the project making estimating the exact cost per station difficult.  And finally, to be honest, the dealers and manufacturers are reluctant to share estimates as it might get them in trouble later in the buying process. 

But at Maxon, we have a different approach.  We believe that you need to have a rough idea of the price of furniture to allow you to budget and plan your purchase.  High quality new office furniture is not cheap and it's in our interest not to shock you with the final quote.  So, we developed the Maxon Project Estimator.  This powerful on-line tool let's YOU develop a quick estimate of your project in minutes.  What we've done is boil down the options into 30 workstation layouts (called typicals in the industry) in three different price ranges (depending on the products, options and nature of materials that you choose).  We then assigned standard discounts to arrive at an estimated "street" price - the price you are likely to pay.  Be advised that this estimate can vary up or down a little bit depending on the final details of your project.  But we feel that the risk of this fluctuation is far outweighed by giving you more information about your office furniture purchase price at the very beginning of the process.  

So, be sure to try our  Project Estimator and let us know what you think; we are always looking for ways to improve it.