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 he came to the Texas plant where I was VP of Operations, he did not suggest that the roller gantry or the vertical press operations he had tracked at Imperial Components or Trussway would be more labor-efficient than the wood tables we used for cut-up trusses. Nor did he discuss the best way to batch cut. He left those decisions to us managers at the plants he visited, and it’s worth exploring how those decisions have been made. [For all images, See PDF or View in Full Issue.]
Competing for the World Record: This decade-long competition energized our industry a half century ago and achieved labor productivity results that have never been exceeded. As recounted in The Last Word, “Vertical Presses — The World Record,” the contest was the brainchild of Automated Builder publisher Don Carlson, and the winner each year was the plant that produced the most trusses in an eight-hour shift. A back-and-forth battle was waged between Jack Littfin at Littfin Truss and Dickie Vail at American Building Components. When Jack produced nearly 1000 trusses, half-again as many as Dickie, it took Dickie two years to find a job with enough like trusses to challenge Jack. In the end, Dickie produced 1017 trusses, or 2260 board-feet per man-hour, a record that even robotics probably will never beat. The enduring lesson from that competition was that cut parts need to be positioned immediately adjacent to their ultimate position in the truss.
Building the Benchmark Trusses: A decade after the World Record competition, and in line with the increasing complexity of trusses, a unique method of determining labor metrics was developed by Ed Buck (see last month’s “Labor Measurement After Houlihan”). Ed selected a series of 14 trusses of various difficulty and measured each step of the assembly process: setting jigs, feeding lumber, setting plates, rolling plates, and truss ejection. Then, the resulting data was used to establish detailed labor metrics that have proven useful until the present day. For example, seven trusses (similar to those shown in the image) can be fabricated in 23 minutes using the WizardPDS®. Multiple plants have benefitted by measuring their performance against these results, building all or a portion of the 14 Benchmark trusses over the past 20 years.
Using Board-Feet per Man-Hour: Early in the new millennium, this commonly used metric took on a new significance when given a more expansive definition, “board-feet per man-hour, all-in (BfM).” I noticed this trend beginning about 2007, among the newly formed group of ProBuild plants. At the time, it seemed that ProBuild was influenced by its financially oriented owners, Devonshire Investors, an arm of Fidelity Investments, seeking an overarching metric, comparable to Earnings Before Interest and Taxes (EBIT). BfM certainly provides a concise and convenient talking point.
In one sense, BfM comports with Houlihan’s imperative to rein in the proportion of the workforce not directly cutting or building trusses, which he asserted was not to exceed half of direct labor. Like the “all-in” proponents, Houlihan fully loaded the labor units with all of the tasks essential to the job of producing trusses, including the full cost of benefits. Houlihan made no assessment of the proper costs of engineering, sales, truck drivers, office administration, or senior management (which some include in BfM) lessening its value in making comparisons.
Of course, many have noted the limitations of BfM, such as last month’s article by Todd Drumond, “Improve Labor Visibility While Keeping Existing Methods in Place,” which notes its failure to account for the mix and complexity of trusses being built. Greg Griggs of Builders FirstSource also affirms that no two facilities among the dozens he manages have the same equipment, layout, or labor environment, rationalizing the variances in their BfM measurements. However, in a plant dedicated to a specific and largely repetitive mix of work, the BfM metric can provide a meaningful, but not precise, month-to-month labor comparison.
Use of Video: Lenny Sylk at Shelter Systems was probably the first to create videos of his build crews to demonstrate best practices for training purposes. This work also facilitated his development of the four key metrics of truss labor — saw-set, saw-run, fab-set, and fab-run — and his pioneering effort to incorporate these in his Forest Products computer system. It seems that this approach is underutilized today, as camera systems are economical to deploy and could instantly alert production offices of plant bottlenecks.
Live Tracking of Employees: Forty years ago at Imperial Components, Dave Chambers experimented with one of the first labor tracking systems in which workers scanned their badges at the start and end of their production tasks. That system proved ineffective, mainly because it was not accompanied by the database and reporting technology that arose in later years. Today, while there is an abundance of tracking tools, they mostly report on a plant’s existing conditions. A newer depiction, called a spaghetti diagram, that charts workers’ physical movements over time can uncover wasted motions and better layouts of inputs and support systems.
Fundamental Principles: No matter what labor metrics are used, the fundamental principles outlined by John Houlihan remain unchanged. Workers need to know the reasonable expectancies of the work in which they are engaging, and they need to regularly see whether they achieve these expectations. That can be accomplished by posting the results on the door to the breakroom, as was formerly done at Sam Yoder & Son, or displayed on a large monitor in the breakroom, such as done at Shelter Systems today. Likewise, management needs to continually monitor schedule misses and take appropriate action as well as utilize a metric that is consistent, easily understood, and based on accurate measurements that reflect the success or shortcomings of their production.