Woolpert spreads its wings

A look through Woolpert’s more than 100 years in the Dayton region includes such recurring themes as aviation and the automotive industry.

Charlton D. Putnam founded the design, geospatial and infrastructure management firm in Dayton in 1911. He provided surveying civil engineering services for clients with well-known names such as John H.Patterson, Col. E.A. Deeds, Orville Wright and James Cox.

Putnam hired Ralph Woolpert, a Stivers High School grad and Ohio State University engineering student, in 1916.

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Today, the company has more than 600 employees across the country with around 200 in its headquarters in Beavercreek. The company is owned by shareholders and led by Scott Cattran, chief operating officer, and Steve Phipps, president and chairman of the board.

The company has seen growth in key markets including aviation, automotive and government, among others.

Woolpert’s history in the aviation industry began with work with the Wright brothers in the early 20th century. That connection has continued with the company testing its unmanned aerial systems (UAS) in North Carolina, a short distance from the Kitty Hawk first-flight site.

Company officials Phipps and Shane Imwalle, senior vice president, said that despite a century in the industry, Woolpert continues to break ground occupying the sky from UAS to manned aircraft and near-earth satellites.

In 2014, the company was the first surveying and aerial mapping business to earn an FAA exemption to fly UAS commercially in designated airspace.

“It was a natural that we got into the UAS,” Phipps said.

The company is involved in the young industry’s groups such as ASSURE – the Alliance for System Safety of UAS through Research Excellence.

Other projects have been with the Corps of Engineers across the country.

“We are working with them to figure out how to integrate their UAS program with their surveying capabilities and some of their aerial photography missions,” Phipps said.

Imwalle said the focus now is not on flying, but on establishing client workflow, rules and liabilities and training requirements.

“The FAA is so restrictive they can’t use them as a productive tool, but they will be able to. We are helping them understand. Once they get the green light, they can hit the ground running and be a leader,” he said.

Work also is done with lasers from planes, known as lidar (Light Detection and Ranging).

In the automotive industry, Woolpert in earlier days assisted General Motors on secondary auto parts work at its Moraine plant.

It more recently has been involved with the Fuyao Glass America plant at the former GM location, providing architecture, engineering, construction support and design consulting services at the 1.4 million-square-foot space to develop the glass manufacturing facility.

“We worked closely with the DDC. We just know that site. We had the resources that they needed,” Imwalle said.

He and Phipps said the process of working with the Chinese, including dealing with the language and cultural barriers, was a challenging, but also rewarding experience. Employees working with the company and able to provide the Woolpert proposal in Mandarin helped overcome language concerns, they said.

In other work, Woolpert in fall 2015 provided aerial imagery of massive flooding in South Carolina in a move to help governments and agencies address immediate needs. Images from the areas hardest hit by flooding were put on a secure website to help the locals and those assisting (National Guard, etc.) respond to road and dam failures, among other uses. The company has two offices in South Carolina.

The company’s goal is to have an equal amount of state/local, federal government and private sector business. The percentages today are around 40 percent state/local, 40 percent federal and 20 percent private.

The company always is looking for young engineers and other related positions, working closely with higher education partners across the area. “We have a strong intern program. It is growing every summer. We have had some great successes with folks who have done internships with us,” Phipps said.

Imwalle said the Dayton community has been “awesome” to the business.

“If you rewind the clock maybe 10 years, it was the Air Force Research Lab that came to us and wanted to be less dependent on East and West coast organizations so they could truly collaborate and not get a black box and not understand how it worked,” he said. “We were the biggest mapping firm in country and did zero with Air Force Research Lab. That has grown into 20 percent of our business.”

The Dayton Development Coalition has facilitated good relationships that also include the University of Dayton Research Lab and others.

“We help each other here in town, that is paramount,” Imwalle said. “That is part of our fabric of who we are. We know who we are and we know who we are not. We partner and compensate for weaknesses and try to do it here as much as possible.”

Despite doing work internationally and having offices across the country (including several in Ohio), Woolpert has kept its headquarters in the region where it was founded.

That hasn’t been by accident.

Dayton is a hub for the company. “Why Dayton? It is a tradition, it's why we have a quarter of our people in the Dayton area,” Phipps said.

“It is who we are culturally,” Imwalle added. “One of the things clients love about us is the Midwest core values. One client in Miami said we work to the spirit of the contract not the letter of the contract. We want to get it done.”

Phipps and Imwalle said future growth is seen in integrating investment in traditional architecture and engineering problems. Among areas mentioned were lidar, thermal energy and sustainable design capabilities, smart building systems, indoor mapping, interior space management, UAS consulting and continuing defense installations overseas.

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