Frame and truss machinery has always competed on mechanical engineering design, and it still does. But, when you ask a plant manager where the day-to-day pain and gains in their plant actually come from, increasingly the answer is software. Throughput, uptime, operator experience — these...

Affectionately dubbed 3.0, the latest generation of Enventek’s NEXPLATE injects Formula 1-style velocity to truss build tables. Building on the foundation of version 2.0 — which debuted last year at the Building Component Manufacturers Conference (BCMC) in Omaha — NEXPLATE 3.0...

One of the most common problems in component manufacturing is not that companies lack effort, experience, or good people. The problem is that many companies are still trying to price, schedule, and measure labor using methods that were never accurate enough for the decisions being made. Board...

Component manufacturing is a constant balancing act. People, timelines, communication, production realities, and customer expectations, all at once. Estimators are trying to turn quotes around faster, designers are solving problems that keep getting more complex, and production teams are...

After more than 30 years of recruiting in the structural building components industry, along with my own background in offsite manufacturing, I have learned that hiring someone is only the beginning. Keeping them is where many companies struggle. One of the biggest complaints I hear from...

Last month’s article, “Is Your Tribal Knowledge Retiring or Expired?”, addresses the “Single Point of Failure” — the realization that your plant’s most valuable intellectual property is currently walking out the door every day at 5:00 PM in the head of a...

It’s the middle of summer at a jobsite for a new school in the South and construction workers are on scaffolding to install windows on the second floor. Outside temperatures are topping 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity is unbearable. Yet, the project must be completed in time for...

It’s about time that a serious contender challenges the dominance of the roller gantry. Its life has been extended with lasers and auto-puck systems, but no upgrade so far has taken the hammer out of the hands of assemblers, its greatest drawback. The only alternative, the vertical press,...

Walk into most structural component manufacturing facilities across North America and you’ll see a familiar contrast: highly sophisticated design software upstream, increasingly automated assembly downstream — and somewhere in the middle, cutting processes that still rely heavily on...

In hockey, “Dump and Chase” is highly effective depending on how deep the puck is dumped into the opposing team’s defensive zone, and how hard the dumping team will chase and fight to get back possession of the puck. The strategy is to physically punish the defending team and...