Two highly consequential labor-saving innovations were hatched at the 1993 National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) Show at the Astrodome complex in Houston, Texas. Outside the Astrodome, two identical model homes were being framed side-by-side, proving the labor savings of components. Inside the Astrodome, a chance meeting sparked creation of the industry’s dominant labor tracking system. While the benefits of both persist, the lasting value of that labor management system and its unlikely genesis are worth further examination.
The chance meeting was between Bob Jones and me, and it resulted in a later meeting at Boozer Lumber in Columbia, South Carolina. As Bob took me down a dusty path through the sprawling, but largely underutilized, Boozer complex, he explained that he was recruited from an unrelated industry to take over Boozer, not long after the death of consummate lumberman William L. Boozer. When we arrived at the very back of the property, the truss plant was a welcome hub of activity, with too little automation and too many hard-working hands, shortcomings that Bob was intent on rectifying with a two-prong approach.
Bob began acquiring automated equipment incrementally for his plant, as volume levels continued to expand during the unprecedented housing runup of the 1990s. Boozer was in the center of the hotbed of that expansion, midway between Charlotte, NC and Charleston, SC. To enable his staff to exploit this opportunity, post-Houlihan, Bob called upon South Carolina’s Manufacturing Technology Center (MTC) with unexpectantly positive results. The MTC’s mission was to redeploy the talent from the declining textile sector to the development of new manufacturing industry. And, fortunately, the MTC sent Ed Buck, who had mastered the latest industrial engineering practice, including Lean Manufacturing and the Theory of Constraints. Thus, Boozer Lumber would eventually lead the application of these technologies to the truss business.
Ed possessed the ideal temperament and coaching skills that both trained and motivated the Boozer team. As Bob lauded the results of Ed’s work, he also worried whether those results could be sustained when Ed departed for his next assignment. Consequentially, Bob corned MiTek’s top management at a Building Component Manufacturers Conference (BCMC) and sold them on the value of incorporating topflight industrial engineering tools in their software. Fortunately, the assignment to work with Boozer was given to an unusually talented field tech rep, Michael T. McMahon. While Michael T. served other customers and supported bootleg programs that he had written and installed across the country, he viewed this opportunity as the culmination of a life’s work and jumped in with both feet.
Michael T. continued his normal support work, while driving the eight hours to Boozer weekly, establishing himself as a contributing member of the Boozer team. Michael T. also became an ardent disciple of Ed’s, encountering industrial engineering theory for the first time but recognizing its relevance to the several truss plants where he had worked and the dozens he had serviced. He was particularly taken with a book by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt, The Goal, which described the Theory of Constraints and that all of Boozer’s team members had been asked to master. After multiple visits and extensive consideration, Michael T. created the framework of a software project which he conceived as a Real-Time Factory Management system (RTFM).
In embarking upon this project, even very early in the Internet era, Michael T. became enamored with the ubiquity of browser-based software. He was among the first to grasp the power of being able to display plant operations data instantly in any place, from the shop floor to the owner’s residence. Michael T. taught himself this technology, with little or no outside assistance. And into this framework, he incorporated the practices Ed was implementing at the Boozer plant, including just-in-time production, pull-through scheduling, and bottleneck identification.
Beginning in the year 2000, after Michael T.’s work had proven itself at Boozer Lumber, MiTek renamed his project as the MiTek Virtual Plant (MVP) and began installing it across its customer base. Having been developed in close concert with a busy plant, and with its embrace of the latest Internet technology, MVP quickly became the mainstay of scores of truss plants across the country.
Although MVP’s development required the convergence of several hard-to-replicate occurrences, that has often been the case with great inventions. At the heart of these breakthroughs are persistent, near-geniuses like Michael T. McMahon, who worked in and studied truss manufacturing his whole nearly 50-year career. During Michael T.’s funeral following his untimely death, his 90+ year-old father told me that Michael T’s eighth grade math teacher said Michael was smarter than he was, and that was why he didn’t finish high school. Michael T. was smarter than his teachers, and his life’s work made thousands of truss people smarter on the principles of industrial engineering.