Raymond Walker, President of The Walker Companies, an Atlanta-based location consulting firm, says his firm integrates very complex and sophisticated analytical disciplines into a highly process-driven service package. Walker's approach addresses such diverse areas as process engineering, logistics, industrial architecture, human resources, construction, taxation and incentives.
      A key ingredient to The Walker Companies' success is its unique WISERSM (Walker Industrial Site Evaluation and Review) system, the company's proprietary site selection modeling tool.
      "Using the WISER site selection optimization model, we quantify investment and operational costs, and analyze numerous qualitative labor considerations such as labor quality and availability and labor union activity," notes Walker.
      The system, which is updated frequently, includes hundreds of cost and demographic variables, such as manufacturing wage rates, union elections, real estate and personal property tax rates, and industrial electricity rates for every county in the United States.
      "We recently used the WISER system to site a steel processing facility that had very stringent requirements," reports John Warden, Executive Vice President of The Walker Companies and developer of the WISERSM system. "Our starting point was the Southeast. The client had to be at or near an inland river port that could handle steel coils and that had rail service. They needed to obtain industrial gas in very large quantities. They also wanted to tap into a local metalworking labor pool, avoid certain labor unions, and they needed good Interstate access and wanted low operating costs. With about 2,000 inland river ports in the study region, we were looking at a challenging set of conditions to satisfy. But using the WISERSM system, we came up with a dozen locations to focus on that met all of the criteria in about three weeks. We are now down to three finalists, and are currently doing in-depth operating cost studies and incentive negotiations."