This article published in DHI May 2021 issue 

PASSIONATE FOR ANSI 

Khozema Kazi, AHC, FDAI, started in the door and hardware industry in May 1993, and has spent his career working in, and around, the Middle East.

His first industry job was with Contract Hardware & Door Distribution where his responsibilities ran the gamut from specifying to scheduling, estimation, ordering and installation. He moved on to join manufacturers Stanley Black & Decker and ZERO International as Business Development Manager to establish and support Contract Hardware Distributors (CHD) and service projects. Now he is with Häfele GCC, managing the company’s ANSI Hardware Division.

Navigating codes in the region is no small feat, as North American, European and British building codes are all adopted in the region.

As an example, Kazi points out that ANSI and EN/BS codes are at odds with each other when it comes to fire and free egress issues. EN/BS will fire rate doors with either positive latch or self-closing, and does not make it a mandatory requirement that the inside lever always free to egress. 

For access control, EN/BS code relies on an electric strike or mag lock, not the variety of electrified door hardware ANSI has. “In addition, the EN/BS code-compliant package is priced much lower than ANSI-compliant door hardware,” Kazi adds. “The products are modular, easy to schedule, a bit more aesthetic and have shorter lead times. Therefore, contractors prefer EN/BS code-compliant hardware as they can order without providing door and other details and at the tail end of project completion.” 

Kazi points out that at times, ANSI-specified projects end up using EN/BS compliant-hardware for the reasons previously cited. “When this happens, navigating between ANSI and EN/BS codes is a no brainer – you can’t. As a result, we can supply ANSI door hardware only on projects if they are ANSI specified, the project manager/consultant will not accept value engineered EN/BS compliant hardware and the owner has the budget for it.”

Another issue to deal with in the region is unqualified installers, according to Kazi. “Door manufacturers have difficulty reading paper templates and most of the time they insist on physical product to prepare the door and frame,” Kazi asserts. “The AHJ can be easily convinced to accept the EN/BS alternative because they too find ANSI hardware quite complicated. We have to really educate each of these entities at every level of the project bid and supply –  it is an uphill task.” 

Kazi believes DHI has an opportunity to educate end users and other stakeholders on the role the industry play in saving lives by representation in local forums, exhibitions, on social media and in advertising. He also thinks it would be helpful to offer workshops conducted by AHJs on the North American Building Codes, its inclusion in local codes and the use of language that leaves little room for alternative interpretation.

In spite of the prominence of EN/BS standards in the region, Kazi notes that AHC certification is very highly valued because Section 08 71 00 of Finish Hardware Specifications mandate the requirement of an AHC in sub-section Quality Assurance and Supplier Qualification. 

“People are surprised when we speak passionately about ANSI door hardware and its role in life safety,” Kazi acknowledges. “It is the best feeling to come out of a meeting having spread our contagious love for door hardware.” 

KHOZEMA KAZI, AHC, FDAI, is Manager, ANSI Hardware Division, Häfele. He has worked in the door and hardware industry for 27 years and resides in Dubai, UAE. Email: khozemakazi.ahc@gmail.com.

Delivering Value through Unique Experiences

This article is published in January 2009 issue of DHI magazine (http://www.dhi.org/)

A brief about the write up:
It is a synopsis compiled by me from a new book that I read recently titled ‘New Age of Innovation’ co-authored by the management guru C.K. Prahalad, the #1 rank holder of ‘Thinkers 50’ (http://www.thinkers50.com/) He has had more winning ideas than most of his contemporaries put together. Be it the idea of ‘core competency’ that he coined along with Gary Hamel, the concept of ‘co-creation’ or the belief that there is a huge opportunity waiting to be tapped at the ‘bottom-of-the-pyramid’ (BOP).
I was impressed by the authors’ concept of transforming business model and decided to write a précis for the benefit of our readers.
Not only me, but corporate executives around the globe are inspired by this book and have created a blog (http://www.newageofinnovation.com/) to discuss the concept and add value.

Consider Starbucks where a customer decides whether to pick up the favorite coffee & run, stay & read the newspaper, have a meeting or do the homework. Or take igoogle which lets user create their own page. Both these companies serve millions of customers, but are providing a platform (storefront of Starbucks and home page of igoogle) around which a customer co-creates their own unique personalized experience.

The message is clear. We are moving to a world in which value is determined by one consumer co-created experience at a time. This is first of the two emerging pillars of innovation in all businesses.

During the industrial revolution many a large firm (e.g. IBM, Ford, Kodak, Philips, Siemens, etc) was vertically integrated. Around mid 1980s they started to source critical components from suppliers, and gradually moved towards global supply chains, accessing specialist and low-cost producers. Thus the supply of products, services, and competencies became multi-institutional. This trend towards access to resources from multiple sources, either local or global, and not just from within or subsidiaries is the second pillar of innovation in all businesses.

Therefore, in this new Era of Innovation, value is created by shaping consumer expectations as well as responding continually to the changing demands, behaviors, and experiences of consumers.

It can be achieved with the help of the two pillars - ‘one consumer experience at a time’ and ‘resources accessed from multiple vendors’, and have them connected together by a glue to be transformed into operations. The connecting glue is ‘Business Processes & Analytics’.

Business Processes is the social architecture of the firm – organization structure, performance measurement, training, skills and values - the link between strategy, business models, and operations. These must be clearly documented, transparent and resilient.

Analytics is the technical architecture of the firm, its information technology backbone. Commitment must be pledged towards Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) to make available the database required to focus on the behavior and needs of one individual customer among 100 million.

The relationship between the above various aspects of innovation in all businesses can be captured in the form of a “House of Innovation” as shown in fig. 1.1

Four driving forces are coming together for the first time in human history to enable emergence of new competitive dynamic that will create a need for continuous change without episodic big breakthroughs:
a) Connectivity and access to information. 3 to 3.5 billion people are getting connected thru cell phones or PC.
b) Digitization & the ability to move this information seamlessly across multiple devices, and dramatic reduction in the cost of computing, communication and storage
c) Convergence of industry and technology boundaries. Today your cell phone is a telephone, a computer, a camera, a watch, a radio & TV
d) Emergence of social networks

Despite of the above, 90% of the thinking on innovation is still very much firm-centric, product-centric view. Imagine passive consumers becoming innovators, rather than the innovation coming out from one genius or one firm. The world is moving at a breakneck speed. Why can’t we take one step forward and say in that new world of competition of active involvement of consumers there is a new and different way to innovate? Is there a different way to leverage the resources of others rather than assume that all the resources have to be inside the company? Once we start with this new perspective of managerial lens, we see change in innovation patterns all across.

Emerging markets are becoming major source of innovation. In the West there is a legacy system due to huge installed base. For instance, for the older generation of Americans, the cell phone is still a supplement, not the primary piece of equipment, but it is not so for the younger generation. Whereas people in the developing world (emerging markets) who never had a phone, that’s not a choice. The cell phone is the only thing they know. Western countries have a forgetting curve, developing countries don’t.

Companies must create a culture of highly decentralized innovation, where people can propose any ideas that they have for new products and services. They get a chance to do it. If it works, they can roll out the concept and scale it rapidly. If it doesn’t they kill it. This process must be based on a strategic intent: Global and Rural, simultaneously. It means they want to serve large global clients but also wants the ability to serve small local customers. The organizing principles between those two is to built resilient business processes that can be continuously changed at a low cost, have solid commitment towards information & communication technologies (ICT) and nurture a social infrastructure conducive to experimentation and desire to win within the broad goal of being simultaneously global and rural.

There is no right or wrong ways to bring about this transformation because each company has a different starting point. A Bridgestone or a Goodyear has a different starting point from a Nike. However, the common factors must be to have a point of view of where they want to go - uniquely developing personalized consumer experience based on co-created solutions - and the belief that no company today has the capabilities to service just one consumer at a time because of the complexity involved in building and sustaining the ecosystem.
So whether it is P&Gs ‘connect and develop’ or Unilever’s ‘Ponds Institute’ or IBM, none of them started with the assumption that we can be vertically integrated and still achieve the core principle of ‘one consumer experience at one time’. They built a supply chain that allowed their manager/s to selectively access resources depending on the demands of the consumer, thus making supply chain important not for cost reasons, but for competitive reasons. So the two put together is exact anti-thesis of Henry Ford and Model T where every consumer got essentially the same car model of the same color


Co-creation by definition reduces risk because consumers are already involved in thinking through what they want. It also reduces time and investment by virtue of inclusive participation of more people and suppliers in development. The assumption is that personalized experiences cost more, but the overwhelming evidence is it costs less. So the default outcome of collectively reducing time, investment and risk, is value creation.

Co-creation leads towards thinking about infinite ways of differentiating experiences, for e.g. unique personalized experiences. Unique experiences avoid the whole process of commoditizing products. If you keep buying books from Amazon, they know the pattern of your purchases and are able to tell you that you will like a particular book as well. The more they know about you, the more they can help you. That also takes care of analytics. So the switching cost for you is high. If you go elsewhere tomorrow, you don’t have the same relationship.


We must recognize that the nature of the relationships between consumers and the firm has changed radically. Starting over a hundred years ago, firms assumed undifferentiated consumers (for e.g. a consumer who bought the Ford model T). Since then, we have moved through various levels of marketplace segmentation of consumer groups.

Even very poor consumers in developing world have a pronounced need for differentiated and personalized experiences. Many of the solutions to poverty that treat the poor as one undifferentiated mass have failed, while approaches that recognizes their unique circumstances and needs by creating locally responsive and personalized solutions have worked. For example, self-help groups (SHGs), which are voluntary organizations consisting of about 12 to 15 women in a village, are able to obtain loans from banks that are developing micro-financing mechanisms. The loans are given to groups, not to individuals. The group then decides who among them and what projects need to be financed on a priority basis. Because the SHGs have intimate knowledge of the local circumstances – of individuals (their financial standings, their behaviors, and their character) as well as the community - their decisions are as local as they can get. The group co-creates their own experiences. They also implicitly supervise how the money is being spent. It is no surprise that the repayment rates tend to be extremely high – as high as 99.5%.

There are no differentiating factors at work anymore, as raw material, technology and capital is freely available. The real constraining factor was talent, but not anymore as now it is becoming possible to hire globally. So the real differentiating factor is the ability to be flexible to change. We need resilient, flexible growing processes. But it is not enough to have processes; we also need the databases and the analytics to focus on the behavior and needs of every individual. ICT comes handy here.

Needless to say, all the investment in ICT architecture is useless without focusing on the skills, behaviors, mindsets and training of managers & employees. It is known that one of the biggest impediments to make people change is not necessarily technology, it is the mindset. People have to genuinely believe that one person at a time - one experience at a time, is the way the world is going.

The focus should be on building organizational capabilities that allow a firm to create the capacity for continuous innovation. Successful innovations seamlessly connect concepts and ideas to their operations manifestations.

Companies who do not make the transition to this new world may risk their very existence. As supplies catch up with demand, consumer will start saying ‘I want to have influence on what happens’. Globally, variations based on customer preferences, biases and behavior will be the order of the day.

This article is published in January 2008 issue of DHI magazine (http://www.dhi.org/)

‘Dissimilar Metals’ - How it affects door & hardware ?

Often design requires that dissimilar metals come in contact, and is no different when dealing with our product line – Door and Hardware. Stainless steel/brass/bronze hardware on steel door/frame and steel fastener in an aluminum weather-strip are common examples.

The whole 'dissimilar metal' subject has to do with what is known as galvanic corrosion, often misnamed "electrolysis". Galvanic corrosion occurs when two dissimilar metals are placed in contact with each other in the presence of an electrolyte (any medium in which an electrical current can flow, viz. moisture, sea water, rain, etc...), resulting in the unintentional formation of a galvanic cell and concomitant chemical reaction of the metals involved. An electrolytic cell is created and metals form an anode or a cathode depending on their relative position on the Galvanic Series Table (attached). The anodic material will be the one to corrode.

For galvanic or dissimilar or electrolytic corrosion to occur, three conditions must exist :
1. The metal join must be wet with a conductive liquid.
The conductive liquid or electrolyte could be rainwater or even water from condensation. Salt or industrial pollution significantly increases the conductivity of water so galvanic effects are normally more severe near the coast or in heavy industrial areas. One complication is that during evaporation, water films become more conductive, so initially benign water may cause quite active galvanic effects as the liquid in the crevice under a bolt or clamp becomes more concentrated.

2. There must be metal-to-metal contact.
Galvanic corrosion can only occur if the dissimilar metals are in electrical contact. The contact may be direct or by an external bolt/screw or wire or pipe.

3. The metals must have sufficiently different potentials.
All metals dissolve to some extent when they are wetted with a conductive liquid. The degree of dissolution is greatest with active or sacrificial metals such as magnesium and zinc and they have the most negative potential. In contrast, noble or passive metals such as gold or graphite are relatively inert and have a more positive potential. Stainless steel is in the middle although it is nobler than carbon steel. The potential can be measured with a reference electrode and used to construct a galvanic series as shown in the chart 1 (ASTM Standard G82).

The rate at which galvanic corrosion occurs depends on several factors:
1. The relative position on the Galvanic Series Table - the further apart materials are in the Galvanic Series Table, the greater the potential for corrosion of the anodic material.
2. The amount and concentration of electrolyte present - an indoor, dry environment will have little or no galvanic corrosion compared to a wet atmosphere.
3. The relative size of the materials - a small amount of anodic material in contact with a large cathodic material will result in greater corrosion. Likewise, a large anode in contact with a small cathode will decrease the rate of attack. (think of a small screw in a large plate).
4. Non-uniform conditions along the surface of a metal can also cause different energy potentials. For example, the portion of an anchor embedded in concrete typically has lower energy potential than the portion exposed to soil, resulting in the exposed portion affected by galvanic corrosion more than the embedded portion.

In effect, it is impossible to prevent all galvanic corrosion. Minimizing its effects to prevent failure is what needs to be considered.

First, always try to eliminate the cathodic metal by making all parts of a structure out of the same material. When this is not possible, either choose materials that are grouped together, or at least close together, in the Galvanic Series chart, or provide a barrier between the two metals, such as paint, non-metallic washers or gaskets.

Another approach is to make small critical parts out of the more cathodic metal so they will be protected. Avoid connecting small anodes to large cathodes (remember the screw on a large plate, always design the fastener as the cathode so the cathodic area is small as compared to the anodic area).

Galvanic crevice corrosion can result in very high corrosion rates. Because of this it is important to avoid intrusion of liquid or moisture in the contact points between dissimilar materials. This can be done with a joint sealing compound, but it is important that this is non-hygroscopic (does not absorb moisture from air) and does not contain any aggressive ions that can be leached during service.

Periodic cleaning or removal of corrosion product films is not recommended for reducing galvanic corrosion because it usually increases corrosion rate.

Avoid hot or cold spots in a construction. If a material in a corrosive environment experiences a temperature gradient this may give rise to a so-called thermo-galvanic corrosion. Normally hot areas will be anodic and cold areas cathodic

Stainless steel, the dominant material in architectural hardware today, is susceptible to its own special form of decay: crevice corrosion, also known as oxygen starvation. Stainless steel contains significant amounts of chromium. When exposed to the atmosphere the surface oxidizes slightly and a thin film of chromium oxide forms, preventing any further oxidation. If exposed to water, salt or fresh, without the presence of air, this film will not form and the metal will corrode. If the water in
question is salt water, the process is accelerated.

Finally, let’s see how we can use galvanic effects to our advantage in preventing corrosion. Suppose the steel member of a structure is being damaged by contact with silicon bronze. That galvanic corrosion can be stopped by connecting both metals to a third metal more anodic than either of them. According to our Galvanic Series, the third metal in this case could be magnesium, zinc, aluminum, or
cadmium. In practice, and for reasons too complex to cover here, zinc works best. The zinc corrodes preferentially to both of the original members of the couple. The steel is now protected, and the zinc is called a sacrificial anode. Such anodes are commonly used together with coatings to control galvanic corrosion. Zinc (called galvanizing) and aluminum coatings are used extensively to protect steel in marine atmospheres. Under severe conditions, the rule of thumb is that a heavy, hot-dipped zinc coating will protect steel for about one year per mil thickness of zinc applied. One mil is equal to 0.001 inch or 0.025 millimeter.

As far as how this relates to door hardware, most steel materials are going to have a decorative and/or rust resisting surface applied, whether that is a zinc plating or a painted surface. Also, most steel doors have a painted coating on them so metal to metal contact is not that great. It will usually happen where they have drilled and tapped holes for attaching hardware. If you attach stainless steel hardware to a steel door or frame, the steel door or frame with corrode first. Although this would be such a slow process that it would take years to notice, because large anode (Steel) is in contact with a small cathode (stainless steel), besides, Stainless steel has an inherent effective passive film so the available corrosion current is quite low.
When installing protection plates of dissimilar metals on doors at corrosion prone location, prefer using self-adhesive 2sided tape instead of screw. You may also use special gasket tape (available with some protection plate mfr.) as a buffer to help prevent tarnishing which may result from electrolytic oxidation between brass plates and steel or stainless steel doors.


Just how frayed, rusty, or old, or whatever, must a piece be for it to be condemned? There are plenty of people out there who can point to a battered but still-functioning hinge and its reinforcement and tell you that it’s held up fine and they’d still trust it in a gale. The Hinge and its reinforcement will sometimes hold together far longer than anyone could reasonably expect. But the point is to have, not a long-lived door/hardware, but a safe and functioning long-lived door/hardware.

Please post your comments about this article. I also invite discussion on other Doors & Hardware related subject.