In my humble opinion, since 2014, United Truss of Innisfil, Ontario, Canada has unofficially held the titles of “The most automated truss plant” in North America and “The most visited truss plant in North America.” United Truss was the un-named but featured truss plant in my May 2022 article, “Debunking the ‘Automation Takes Too Much Space’ Myth.” [For all photos, see PDF or View in Full Issue.]
United Truss has been visited by a “Who’s Who” of the US truss industry, including ProBuild, Builders FirstSource, 84 Lumber, USLBM, S.R. Sloan, Ridgway Roof Truss and Toll Integrated Systems, just to drop a few names that made the trip to United to see how they Feed the Beast! In Canada, it is easier to ask who has not yet visited United Truss. As mentioned in last month’s article, “Incremental CapEx ROI and Plant Tours” United Truss is a textbook study just like R&K. United Truss started with a fully loaded RetroC automatically fed lumber from a Lumber PickLine to auto-fill carts which funded future investments and optimized investments in table automation. United Truss will tell you that they could not have achieved their goals if they did not invest in material handling and sawing first — yes, they knew how they were going to Feed the Beast!
United Truss incorporates traditional truss plant automation, such as automated saws to cut the lumber, auto jigging to set up the truss perimeters, and overhead lasers to help position the truss plates. Traditional automation is not why people come to visit United Truss. People come to see the efficiency and simplicity of United Truss cutting lumber for multiple jigs with just one human picking lumber and one human saw operator with auto-fill lumber carts — which is all part of their complete in line lean manufacturing system. The collated lumber and collated truss plates (per joint) arrive at the tables organized for left and right of truss, which results in an average of 2–3 minutes per truss build time, optimizing United’s investment in traditional truss building automation.
For United Truss, this is a standardized day-in and day-out of 2–3 minute per truss, not just for a run of benchmark trusses as described in Joe Kannapell’s November 2020 article, “60 Years of Machines, Part XII: Best of Both.” Material has to arrive in front of the truss build tables organized so that truss builders just keep building trusses, not wasting time and energy finding and/or sorting material for every truss.
Truss plants are the original off-site construction component manufacturers. The sheer volume and size of trusses, along with the variability of lumber and complexity of truss shapes, is just beginning to be addressed on scale with industrial robotics. Interestingly and economically, with all of United’s automation they do not need full-time maintenance personnel, and trusses can be produced at volume and complexity with just one lumber picker, one sawyer, three truss builders, and one forklift operator. To produce even more trusses, all they need to do is add truss builders (if and when they can find them!).
When hosting visitors, Allan Inglis likes to praise the significant reduction in paperwork and the ease of cross-training, especially when businesses just can’t find people. To David Sandke, it is the continued operating-cost savings that have funded annual CapEx improvement projects that have enabled them to continue to look after their loyal and growing customers.
What’s next for United Truss? Ed DeBiasio has already approved a building addition to put the entire Lumber PickLine under roof. Ed has a vision and he continues to implement a profitable plan.
We at Enventek and LimTek are proud that Ed DeBiasio relied on us to help him and his team execute his plan. We are grateful for United’s continual hospitality of hosting plant tours that have resulted in many additional sales for us and we would like to take this opportunity to thank Allan, David, and Ed! On behalf of Larry Dalson, Dave Dalson, and myself, thank you, and it was nice to catch up with everyone at BCMC this year.