faces of the future - Illuminating Engineering Society

FUTURE LEADERS
You can’t say Lara Cordell doesn’t
have a bold agenda for the lighting
industry. Her goal, quite
simply, is to reinvent the product procurement
process. Cordell, director of
technology with distributor Wiedenbach-Brown,
has launched two major
initiatives in her two years with the company:
one is the Owner-Direct Lighting
Procurement (ODLP) program; the other
is the LED Performance Assessment
Screening System (LED PASS).
The ODLP program gives WB a seat
at the table with key members of the design
and construction team—the architect,
engineer, lighting designer, owner’s
rep, general contractor and electrical
contractor—during the early phase of
the project (i.e., design development).
“When a project goes to bid through the
typical distribution channel, the lighting
package gets awarded prior to submittal
review, which puts the design intent
at risk. With ODLP, we bring control
back to the design team, working on
their behalf to negotiate fixture pricing
with reps and manufacturers. This
gives designers the power to decide how
and where to ‘spend’ the budget in reference
to real costs, down to sales tax and
freight,” says Cordell. “The goal is pricing
clarity so we can meet the owner’s
budget, upfront, during design, thereby
eliminating the need for future value engineering
and associated project delays.”
Meanwhile, with the LED PASS program,
Cordell has taken on the role of
LED watchdog for WB. “The goal was
to develop a set of criteria whereby LED
products can be quantitatively scored on
their effectiveness to retrofit a given application.
Some of the criteria are general
go/no-go questions, others relate
to threshold performance of the existing
product and others focus on general
manufacturer questions including financial
well-being. This allows me to quickly
weed through the junk (they generally
don’t have UL or LM-79) and then prioritize
which products to mock-up. I call this
approach, ‘guilty until proven innocent.’ ”
Cordell’s technology evaluations
have a high currency in the marketplace
due to her background. After
earning a Master of Science from Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute’s Lighting
Research Center, she started her career
on the design side of the fence,
with the Long Beach, CA, office of
Lighting Design Alliance. Three years
later, she transitioned to the product
side of the industry. “I was approached
to join a start-up manufacturing company
[LITE360] as a partner. Eighteen
months later the economy took a tumble
and we closed up shop.”
Cordell was quickly approached by
WB, and two years later she calls it “the
best decision I’ve made in my career.”
A FEW KIND WORDS: “I find Lara one of
the industry’s best tipping points because
her knowledge is based on some good
practical experience consolidated from
many parts of the industry food chain,”
says Lee Waldron of Grenald Waldron
Associates. “As a knowledge maven with
a good business sense, she will influence
the future understanding of lighting information
by both specifiers and clients.”
DOWN THE ROAD: In the short-term,
Cordell is focused on nurturing the
ODLP programand “hope to grow it” into
the preferred path for procurement.”
Paul Tarricone
LARA CORDELL
WIEDENBACH-BROWN,
YORBA LINDA, CA
CAREER CAPSULE
• LC; LEED AP
• Robert J. Besal Fund
Scholarship
• Board member of the
IES Orange County
Section and the IALD
Education Trust
• IES Lumen West and
IIDA Award of Merit for
the Port of Los Angeles
Waterfront
‘The path I’ve
taken from
design, to
manufacturing
and finally
distribution
has allowed
priceless insight
into how our
industry works,
and I have a
vision for how
I’d like to see
it work in the
future.’
LD+A December 2010 53