Now more than ever, every process, every motion, literally every minute counts for a component manufacturer. The saying “Time Is Money” couldn’t be more true in our industry. Ultimately, a component manufacturer is simply selling time. They are selling the value they add to raw...

Looking back at my articles in 2022, have you noticed what several have in common? Consider the plants featured in these stories: United Edge Structural Components, “In-Line Truss Production Starts With Lumber Picking” (December) United Truss, “The Most Automated, Most...

For anyone who’s ever wanted to take a trip Down Under, I have the perfect reason for you to go – visiting Vekta! December brought an exciting opportunity for me to make my first trip to visit the Vekta headquarters and factory in Perth, Australia. I started as the General Manager of...

The Truss Properties Manager makes it easier for designers to review the trusses in the job and confirm they are designed as expected. Truss designers must consider a variety of factors when creating designs. They are expected to work quickly to produce low-cost and highly accurate jobs per...

Twelve competitors faced one another for the first time—but only because they had to. Each of their fledgling plate businesses was threatened by a July 31 deadline from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and they had less than three weeks to put together a design criterion for...

With today’s high-demand market conditions, capacity is everything. Capacity constraints are widespread across our industry and have been for a while now. Many have added the capacity they can afford in the form of additional equipment. Some have been fortunate enough to add labor to...

This month, we get a sneak peek at a greenfield truss plant that drank from the same punch bowl as some established truss plants to Feed the Beast! Previous articles have highlighted existing truss plants that have literally banked on Enventek’s proven in-line lean manufacturing system to...

With automated saws and auto-jigging tables, what remains is automated material handling, and that’s what we find at Builders FirstSource’s (BFS) Austin plant. House of Design’s (HoD) robotic roof line there extends the floor truss pre-plating methodology found at their Atlanta...

After Cal Jureit’s impressive debut at the 1958 NAHB Show, lumberyards and builders across America were anxious to start trussing, but they encountered several obstacles. Their deluge of inquiries couldn’t all be answered, and most were far away from the South Florida source of...

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is credited with the origin of the phrase, The only constant in life is change. This couldn’t be more true in the world we live and work in today. Whether we are enduring labor shortages, a global pandemic, material shortages, input cost increases, or an...