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We had a great week at BCMC. It was good to catch up with customers, meet manufacturers who were seeing Paragon for the first time, and get our team together on the show floor. We had a lot to show this year, and watching people react to what we’ve been working on made the months of...

Over the years, I have walked through more manufacturing facilities than I can count. I have looked at production lines, equipment, material flow, workforce, leadership, automation, safety, quality, inventory, scheduling, and just about every other part of an operation. Recently, I was reminded...

Component manufacturers are operating in a market with little room for waste. Housing demand is difficult to predict. Material prices shift quickly. Labor is expensive and difficult to find. Customers still expect competitive pricing, dependable schedules, and fast turnaround. Those pressures...

Are you ready to see JAX-XL retrieve materials for a lumberyard the way JAX retrieves lumber for a truss plant? In our BCMC booth, you’ll be able to track the movement of lumber and sheet goods from bunks to staging areas live on a monitor via 3D digital twin technology, all without manual...

For years, component manufacturers have faced a classic operational dilemma: choose the high-volume speed of traditional batch cutting on component saws or opt for the simplified material flow of cut-by-truss on linear saws. Because linear saws could “stretch”/optimize lumber, this...

When The Truss Company purchased its first RetroC component saw in 2014, the company was understandably skeptical. At the time, the RetroC was still a relatively new product, and some questioned whether it could hold up in a high-volume production environment. The saw would be expected to...

In the mid-20th century, Toyota revolutionized manufacturing with a clear idea: eliminate waste, optimize the flow of value, and improve continuously. Lean manufacturing changed how physical goods are built by putting the worker’s time and effort at the center of every decision. At...

As discussed in The Last Word in May, “John Houlihan’s Contributions,” John Houlihan introduced a proven way to manage plant labor, applying his trade to plant systems as they were, rather than how they could be, which was reflective of his background outside our industry. When...

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...