At a high-volume truss plant just outside Denver, Colorado, one person now keeps 14 build stations supplied with plates — truss by truss, across six tables. Not long ago, that same job meant carts of partial plates scattered across the floor, boxes and totes stacked wherever space was available, and extra plates ending up on random skids with no clear place to go. Today, a single NexPlate system can supply the plant’s roof manufacturing lines, and the results have been hard to ignore.
Plate picking has always been one of those necessary support jobs in truss manufacturing. It may take only one or two people, but production depends on them keeping the tables supplied accurately and on time. The idea behind NexPlate was simple: automate the work so it’s faster, more consistent, and less dependent on skilled labor. But over the ten years it took to move from concept to reality, a bigger question emerged — what if automation could do more than speed up picking? What if it could help plants build trusses more efficiently, with fewer interruptions and fewer errors?
Traditionally, plates are picked and delivered to the table in batches — often in cardboard boxes or totes labeled with a handwritten job number on a scrap of paper or scrawled on the side of the box. From there, the team still has to dig through the plates, open packaging, cut straps, pull off plastic wrap, and clear the waste piling up around the table during assembly. For a process that lives or dies on speed, accuracy, and consistency, there had to be a better way.
That is where truss-by-truss picking changes the conversation. Instead of a batch, NexPlate stages one truss in one bin, organized layer by layer. Workers pull from the top and work their way down as they move around the table — no searching, no sorting, no guesswork.
Going in, we were hoping for even a modest gain in productivity at the table — anything measurable would have been a win. The only way to find out was to put the system into a real production environment. In Denver, the answer came fast.
What made the install remarkable wasn’t just that a single operator could feed 14 stations across six tables. It was that the system did it one truss at a time — a workflow that had always been too labor-intensive to attempt by hand.
Speed was never the challenge. NexPlate runs more than 2,500 plates per hour and can send a full job to the floor as soon as it starts, keeping tables supplied without waiting. But throughput is only part of the value. The bigger improvement is accuracy: because plates are staged by truss, crews are no longer picking from a mixed batch where wrong sizes, wrong counts, and missed plates can easily slip through.
The gain in production was real and immediate — but the bigger story was the order NexPlate brought to the floor. Before NexPlate, boxes, totes, and partial plate returns were spread throughout the table area. Extra plates could end up on random skids, in different totes, or wherever there was open space, making it hard to know what belonged where and what was safe to use. That constant delivering, returning, and re-sorting created clutter, confusion, and wasted movement.
The reaction on the floor said the rest. Assembly crews found their jobs easier and less frustrating, while plant management saw something it had been chasing for years: more trusses out the door with the same crew.
At Enventek, we build more than equipment — we build better production processes. Our products increase output, reduce cost, and make the work easier, but the process they bring to the floor often delivers just as much value.
NexPlate is that kind of solution. It doesn’t just move plates faster; it changes how plates flow through the plant. In the Denver facility, that meant more production, better organization, and a cleaner, more repeatable process.
To learn more about NexPlate, visit www.nexplate.com or call 269-815-4150 to speak with our team about purchasing a NexPlate for your facility.