"It’s the ordinary things that truly fascinate us,” confided legendary showman P.T. Barnum more than a century ago. That observation of human nature holds as true, if perplexing, now as it did then. For what, in today’s high-tech world, could possibly be more ordinary than . . . water? Most of the Earth is covered with it. The sky is often filled with it. And virtually none of us goes a day of our lives without seeing, touching and actually swallowing the stuff. Why, then, do untold numbers of sophisticated people, from Detroit to Budapest, stop dead in their tracks and stare in amazement at ordinary water streaming from the fountains built by a small Los Angeles firm named WET Design?

Those drop-jawed masses are responding to an unconventional mix of art, physics and engineering that at first appears simple, but upon further study, becomes so impossibly complex that it’s unlike anything they’ve ever experienced before. It’s water for water’s sake. Unlike historical fountains, where water is just a veneer falling over a statue or sculptured edifice, in these high-tech fountains, the water is the medium.

As the best known creator of water features in the world, WET Design is perhaps most renowned for its spectacular 9-acre lake of animated fountains at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, which entertain thousands of visitors daily. The same fountains were featured in a widely celebrated 4-minute scene of near-hypnotic reflection at the end of the otherwise action-filled motion picture, “Ocean’s Eleven.”

Tranquility, however, represents only one of the many styles of water features for which this firm is famous. Other WET projects range from the innovative Watercourt at California Plaza in Los Angeles, where water occupies the stage with live performers, to an expansive wall of animated fire and water constructed for the seven-star Burj al Arab Hotel in Dubai. In between are municipal water projects for major cities the world over; institutional designs for clients like the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C.; and unique commercial displays designed to attract and entertain crowds at major shopping areas from Hong Kong to Madrid. The interior fountain in Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center, home of the International Manufacturing Technology Show, is a classic WET design.

The initial incarnation of WET Design, WET Enterprises, was conceived more than 20 years ago by Mark Fuller, a man with a lot of energy and a lot of ideas. One of those early ideas stemmed from Fuller’s investigation of an obscure physical phenomenon known as the “laminar stream” for his undergraduate civil engineering thesis at the University of Utah. Scientists had long been aware of this peculiar turbulence-free behavior of flowing water, but little had been done to expand the curious effect into anything more than a complex mathematical exercise.

Fuller’s work led to the development of a technique producing rapidly flowing arcs of water that appeared completely motionless. The visual effect was stunning— almost unbelievable—leading the American Institute of Architects to quickly bestow an award on Fuller’s accomplishment. The seed—for entertaining people with a combination of dramatic architecture and intriguing water effects—was planted.

A year later, with a master’s degree in design from Stanford, Mark Fuller found himself employed in the Special Effects Design Department of The Walt Disney Company, “specializing,” he recalls with a grin, “in the creative misapplication of high technology.” He actually had interviewed for a regular engineering position at Disney, but fortunately, someone perceived Fuller’s talent for unconventional thinking and changed his job assignment. “Any crazy idea that the Disney planners came up with that didn’t fit into the realm of normal engineering,” remembers Fuller, “was given to the special effects guys. We dealt with all sorts of technology—the volcanoes, the Energy Pavilion, the live steam effects and, of course, the water features. We were given a lot of freedom.”

That all-important design freedom, combined with Fuller’s innate fascination with the laminar stream, eventually led to the creation of the imaginative LeapFrog water-arc feature at Disney World’s EPCOT Center in Florida. The public’s reaction to the seemingly motionless flying water was both immediate and overwhelming: “Wow! . . . How did they do that?” This breakthrough combination of ordinary water and extraordinary technology quickly led to other project invitations for Fuller, and to the formation of WET Enterprises in 1983.

Today, the company is known as WET Design, and it has grown into a multifaceted organization of 130 designers, engineers, machinists, artists, architects and business development personnel. They’ve even had an astronaut heading research and development. There’s a hardware division (WET Labs), and a service division (WET Care), each working toward the same cutting-edge goals as the design group. Though relatively small in comparison to most international enterprises, the company dominates the fountain design industry. In fact, it could easily be argued that WET actually created the industry as it is known today.

The division that gets down to the real nitty-gritty of transforming designed fantasy into practical reality is WET Labs. This hardware branch of the company is located a few miles north of the Los Angeles main offices, in a facility comprising 20,000 square feet of manufacturing space, including a 5,000-square-foot machine shop with a staff of seven busy machinists.

The majority of the work on the shop floor is produced from 17-4 and 304 stainless steel, or red brass. “We’d like to be able to use something easy, like aluminum,” says Chuck Schmitz, WET’s Manager of Production, “but we can’t, because the environment’s way too harsh.” Most of the company’s products are ultimately sunk underwater, where they’re expected to perform flawlessly for years on end.

Parts as diverse as specialized lighting fixtures, high-pressure air and water fittings, plumbing couplers, nozzles and multi-nozzle platens, gimbal yokes and control arms for robotic assemblies, and watertight enclosures for electrical items are all part of the normal workflow here. In addition, large quantities of proprietary fasteners, couplings and adjusters, all designed to allow for tool-free underwater maintenance by divers in bulky gear, keep the shop especially busy.

Fuller’s commitment to in-house manufacturing capability for the firm’s products is a relatively recent passion. “In the very beginning,” he says, “The idea was to just design and build fountains using off-the-shelf components. But a couple of years into that, we thought, ‘If only somebody made the black box we need, just think what we could do!’ But nobody made it. So we began outsourcing. We’d draw it up and let the construction contractor try to build it, but we had no control over the process. The contractor would be scared [of the project] and price it to the moon, and our clients would know they didn’t have single-point accountability if something went wrong later. So that was a very short-lived process.”

Even after bringing assembly and some of the machining in-house, the growing company was still subject to the long and ever-increasing lead times of their sub-contractors. “In outsourcing,” says Fuller, “you have to know more about the item than the person who’s building it, just to ensure he does it right. You have to have the expertise on your payroll anyway, and last-minute improvements and changes cost a fortune. So, in terms of maintaining control of your destiny and delivering the best product to your client, it’s just not a good business model.”

Lessons learned, WET put its pinky in the water, so to speak, and began upgrading from manual machines to CNC —cautiously at first, with a single Haas VF-4 vertical machining center. That initial move, however, proved so successful that the shop soon found it had created a production bottleneck: They had too many parts they wanted to machine. The machinists were delighted with their newfound capability, but realized they needed more CNC machines. In a relatively short time, WET Labs added more Haas machines—a VF-2, a dual-spindle TL-25 lathe, a VF-3APC (automatic pallet changer) and a VF-8.

Improved production flexibility and turnaround speed were the main incentives for investing in that first Haas machine, but WET quickly realized that, as a bonus, they now had the ability to fine tune and optimize their designs, thereby significantly improving the quality of their products. Today, the shop’s approach to production work is purposely kept in a state of review and evolution. “We find better ways of doing things almost every day,” emphasizes Nadine Schelbert, WET’s Design Delivery Director. “We’re trying to make products that are more durable and way more maintenance-free.”

Almost nothing made at WET is as simple as it looks, and the design and machining procedures are always open for improvement. “We have a lot of really passionate people here,” says Schelbert, “and occasionally we have some really heated arguments, but at the end of the day, we have a better product.”

While each WET Design project is uniquely conceived and individually constructed, it obviously must come from an existing array of building blocks. “With each job,” confides Fuller, “we build our bag of tricks. So everything that’s new for one project becomes something we can use on another. In the end, though, the final project is completely custom for each customer; we never repeat ourselves. But does an architect use the same type of bricks from one project to another? Of course. At the component level you want to standardize.”

But what happens to that inventory of standardized components when a design change occurs? “That’s a driving fear,” says Fuller. “The more inventory you have when you change something, the more scrap you have, and about 70% of our requirements are for existing components and inventory.” WET’s solution was simply to eliminate the inventory, or at the very least, reduce it to a bare minimum. The company has completely embraced the concept of lean manufacturing.

Many of the benefits of lean manufacturing, notes Fuller, are initially easy to overlook. “You can’t deliver a product, and get paid for it, until you’ve got 100% of the parts. But this type of workflow all but eliminates the hidden costs of maintaining parts inventories, not to mention the total loss of inventory whenever a new design obsoletes an existing component. And by eliminating the overhead of ownership,” he explains, “you’re free to improve and evolve your concepts.”

Fuller and crew have applied their “lean” methodology to other aspects of the company as well, including the design process. According to Nadine Schelbert, they have a “lean meeting” twice a week, where even the concept of a static part drawing has been eliminated. To counter the psychological inertia of “ownership” of time-consuming finished drawings, they project the rough designs onto write-on bulletin boards (which are installed nearly everywhere in the building, including the break rooms), and trace around them with a marker. “This gives us a good working diagram,” notes Schelbert, “which on one objects to the group changing and improving. The meetings now take less time, and every couple of months we’re seeing big jumps in improvement.”

Fuller concedes that the change from the long-established working procedures to the new lean approach can be a bit jarring. “You’re asking people to change the way they breathe,” he says. “But once you get the ball rolling, they all see, Wow, this really does work. And they understand that it wouldn’t just be nice if they contributed their ideas—we now expect them to contribute.”

WET’s production planning is now “pull” oriented, driven by the immediate need for completed assemblies. Thanks to the capability of their Haas machines, about the only jobs sent out to sub-contractors are for spinning and plating the lamp reflectors. “And those jobs, more times than not,” says Chuck Schmitz, “end up being the longest poles in the tent.”

For that reason, machining is a much appreciated art at WET, and making sure machinists’ “tribal knowledge” isn’t lost, if and when employees leave, is another facet of the company’s lean strategy. What used to reside solely in the heads of the machinists is evolving into a library of G-code programs, common fixtures and established processes. The Haas machining centers are outfitted with identical sub-plate systems to ensure that nearly any job can be run on any machine, further simplifying production and increasing efficiency. For example, “The 4th-axis rotary table used to take us a day and a half to get off the floor and get it located,” remarks Schmitz. “Now we do it in less than half an hour. And we developed all the tooling very quickly.” Combined with the easy-to-use controls of the Haas machines, this universal fixturing provides the flexibility demanded by the shop’s commitment to “pull” production.

For Fuller, the opportunity to get the ball rolling on lean manufacturing came with the acquisition of enough Haas CNC machines to establish the in-house production capability that WET Design needed. He jokes that they had a very organized process for getting there. “I’d ask the guys what they needed, and then I’d say, ‘No, I’m going to buy something bigger and more capable.’ They’d tell me I was crazy, but three months later they would be saying they couldn’t be doing it without that machine. It’s easy to sit back and say, ‘Boy, that’s a large investment.’ But that investment broadens the spectrum of what we can do, and when we limit ourselves in the short term, we’ve limited ourselves in the long term.”

“The VF-8 is a good example,” says Schmitz. “We looked at that and said, ‘That’s such a big machine, how are we ever going to utilize it efficiently?’ But when we got all the machines up and running, that’s the machine we use the most! One thing we can do now is make the forms for spinning the lamp reflectors; we used to have to send that entire job out.”

As CEO, Fuller still had to convince a somewhat skeptical board of directors that his expenditures were warranted. “Swallowing a bunch of half-million dollar machines in half a year was just not an option,” he states. “But because of the way Haas puts these things together in pricing, it wasn’t the unthinkable capital step we first thought it might be. We were getting top-drawer machines at a very good price, and it was easy to do the value justification. It enabled us, as a small- to medium-sized company to play in the same realm as the really big guys. These machines opened the doors for us to be a state-of-the-art, very nimble and very lean manufacturing facility.”

The shop’s machinists are similarly pleased. According to machine shop supervisor Brad Keil, they feel they’re being introduced to a broader and broader knowledge base each day. “Final machined components are designed almost exclusively in SolidWorks,” he says, “and from there, tool paths are determined and the G-code is generated in MasterCam. On the TL-2, though,” he continues, “we’re using MasterCam for some work, and the Intuitive Programming System for other. Our traditional machinists fell in love with it [the TL-2] right away.”

To speed part setup and changeover of the many brass sand castings they machine, WET has installed probing systems (Haas Visual Quick Code Probing) on their Haas mills. “Having the ability to probe the casting before we machine it is saving us a lot of time,” says Schmitz, “because the castings we receive are up to plus or minus 30 thou’ in tolerance. It allows us to optimize where we punch the holes and stuff like that, and minimizes scrap.” Based on the information provided by the probe, the program is automatically modified to optimize the datum points to produce perfect wall thickness in the machined piece.

Another feature that’s paying off, Schmitz continues, is the dual pallet capability of the VF-3APC. “We can be setting up and changing parts while we’re still having a spindle turning, and it doesn’t have to be the same part. Because we’re interested in single-part flow for a single product, the dual fixturing on one machine is perfect.”

In conventional, batch-style production, maximizing spindle time is often the primary goal. With lean manufacturing, however, it’s not always necessary, or even beneficial, to keep every spindle running all the time. “Having been schooled in the traditional way of manufacturing,” says Fuller, “I assumed that an expensive asset had to be kept running all the time. So I’d pressure the shop to crank out unneeded parts and put them into inventory. Now we’ve changed. There’ll be times when all the machines are running, and there’ll be times when only on or two are running. But that’s not the measure; the measure is throughput.

“I can have nearly everything I need,” Fuller adds, eminently practical, “but without that final piece, it’s just a box of parts. Having 99% of the parts is no good to the next step, which is assembling it. How we schedule and run the machines is based on our goal of having two completely finished, assembled and packaged robotic units per day. When these get to the job site, they can be installed in about the same time it takes to make the next two. It doesn’t do the on-site contractors any good to get a huge box of assemblies from us that they’ll mostly just have to set aside. Those first 99 parts generate inventory costs, but the 100th part generates an invoice and cash.”

The real business of WET, as Fuller quickly tells you, “is the business of entertaining people. “But having a practical sense of how to blend science and art with human behavior and manufacturing skill hasn’t hurt the firm one bit. While its clients and competitors the world over are fascinated by this company’s drive to grow and change, those within it are not. Fuller reminds us with a smile, “Evolution is a daily occurrence.”

While surveying WET Design’s cutting-edge facilities, Fuller reveals his passion for what he does with a simple observation. “You know,” he says, “two things always thrill me. Taking off in an airplane”—he’s done it thousands of times, but still finds it hard to imagine that much power— “and standing under a laminar stream,” that hard-to-imagine but natural effect that started it all. It really is the ordinary things that fascinate us.