The way it was – In 1986, as Dick Rotto embarked on a nationwide expansion, he admonished his salesforce, “Trussway will never have another plant as big as our Houston location.” Rotto’s warning came at a time when there wasn’t enough business in the entire state of Texas to fill that plant. And this near depression in Texas came after Trussway had weathered two prior downturns. [For all images, See PDF or View in Full Issue.]
Twenty years later, Gifford Shaw taunted his nearby competitor, “Bob, I was driving down the Interstate, and I saw that General Motors was coming to town.” Gifford was mocking Bob Jones’ outsized 300’ x 400’ truss plant building, the largest greenfield expansion in the Eastern U.S. Although it was well equipped, Bob’s business succumbed to the 2008 recession, even after a 60-year run in the prosperous Carolinas. Yet, two contrary examples arose during the same period.
The way it is becoming – In the late 1990s, NVR built a 300’ x 400’ facility, understanding that, even in lean years, they would build enough houses to sustain it. And in 2006, Shelter Systems followed suit nearby, recognizing that they had tapped only a fraction of the multi-family market. Both relied on their 30-year track records operating in the recession-resistant DC–Baltimore–Northern Virginia market, using their experience to shape their new facilities. For example, Shelter moved all of their raw material inside their new structure and devised an automated bunk-to-saw handling system (which I’ll discuss in more detail next month). Shelter’s owner, Joe Hikel, concluded that his company would not have survived the severe 2008 downturn in their old quarters. In NVR’s case, their expansion was part of a new multi-plant model that is worth examining.
NVR is emulating, inadvertently, Carroll Shoffner’s “mother-ship” model of truss plant operations that he perfected 50 years ago. Shoffner centralized all overhead functions at his Burlington, North Carolina headquarters, including corporate management, accounting, and human relations. All truss design and shop paperwork was prepared there and dispatched by courier to his 14 plants. The size of his satellite plants depended on the size of the market they were serving. So, in the prosperous DC–Baltimore market that they shared with NVR, Shelter, and others, Shoffner purchased the 150,000 sq ft former Ryland plant. But in rural Fishersville, Virginia, Shoffner built a minimally sized structure, which was even small enough he could operate it without installing sprinklers.
Of course the centralization saves money, but there are additional benefits. NVR and other multi-plant facilities, including Universal Forest Products Inc. (UFPI) who purchased Shoffner’s facilities in 1998, can use their headquarters staff and facility to train future plant managers. There they can evaluate new hires and send the best of them out to the satellites when they are ready. UFPI follows a similar prudent expansion plan as their predecessor. However, when called for, none of these CMs hesitate to acquire Class A facilities.
The big get even bigger – A new paradigm for plant designs is emerging with the advent of material handling systems. These typically feed a single-sided gantry system and require much more width perpendicular to truss tables. Sunpro’s Utah plant shown here includes a 5-bin Hundegger Ejection Cross Conveyor system serving a 100 ft long truss line. Note that each bin contains the cut parts for a single truss and is equipped with a retractable stop to maintain separation between adjacent trusses. This provides a considerable buffer of work behind truss builders. However, a great deal of floor space is required, and when combined with the truss table and its side-eject conveyor, it occupies a space of nearly 100 ft. Accommodating Sunpro’s three truss lines requires a building 300 ft wide.
Few existing truss plant buildings are wide enough to easily accommodate Vekta, MiTek, or Hundegger conveyance systems. So, as these systems prove themselves, more big buildings will be required to house them, raising the cost of entry into the truss business, but also raising the quality of the work environment and the product.