The Situation
CreateMe needed to open a prototype factory in the East and South Bay. The goal wasn't just finding available industrial space — it was finding the right location within reasonable distance of their headquarters that would maximize access to a highly specialized engineering talent pool while minimizing attrition risk to their existing workforce. A poorly-sited facility could simultaneously fail to attract new talent and accelerate turnover among the people they already had.
The specialized occupational mix CreateMe required — computer hardware engineers, mechanical engineers, industrial engineers, software developers, and electrical engineers — was not uniformly distributed across the Bay Area. Where those workers lived, and whether a new facility location would be accessible to them within a reasonable commute, was the central question.
The Approach
We conducted a workforce composition assessment customized to CreateMe's specific occupational requirements, identifying the precise SOC codes that mapped to their engineering needs and quantifying where those workers actually lived across the Bay Area. We built a labor catchment model to identify which specific locations within their target geography would capture the highest concentration of target talent within a defined drive time.
A simultaneous commute analysis and time-optimized center of gravity study measured the inter-site travel burden the new facility would create for existing employees who needed to move between headquarters and the new location — a cost that's rarely modeled and almost always underestimated.
The facility sited on rent economics alone would have been in the wrong place. The analysis moved the decision from a map to a model — and the model pointed somewhere different.