A
Th e
Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$$er
February 2022 #14271 Page #10
Sixty Years of Machines Part XXVII: Optimization Redefined Joe Kannapell
new truss plant owner faced a daunting challenge: local home builders wouldn’t use trusses and apartment builders were driving tough bargains. The owner’s partner, Charlie Barns, 250 miles north in Dallas, couldn’t have understood since he was cranking out hundreds of trusses a day. Yet the owner, Dick Rotto at Trussway Houston, had risked all he had on this startup, and had to figure out how to survive on low margined work. Fortunately, Rotto brought in some key people to help him get there.
A
Rotto’s truss designer, Mark Rolf, suggested shifting truss webs slightly to be able to cut them out of shorter stock – thus optimizing truss configurations. However, this made it harder to get cutting details since Gary Sweatt’s Cutting Manuals only covered standards. Rolf could run the trusses through the Online Data teletype, but, in 1972, this racked too much timesharing expense, long before this became a standard feature in truss programs. Dick Rotto’s other key hire, John Wiggs, figured out how to become even more competitive. Wiggs prided himself in looking beyond what the plans specified and recommending more costeffective alternatives. For example, he’d lower roof pitches slightly to preclude piggybacks, replace expensive beams with truss girders, or stretch the normal 24” spacing to eliminate trusses. It didn’t take long for this building design optimization to become a widespread industry practice. Downstream from these design practices were the gains that resulted from optimizing saw batches. At Heart Truss & Engineering, this had always been a key driver of efficiency. Heart’s Bob LePoire recognized the value of combining like pieces to save saw time, and challenged one of his designers, Ken Dugopolski, to write a program to do so. The result was the Shelter Engineering Program of the mid-1980s (not to be confused with the Forest Products Industries [FPI] program offered by Shelter Systems of New Jersey). The Shelter program read the engineering output files and created optimal batches, but it also relabeled truss members as it did so. The beneficial result was that each unique piece type had a unique label. For example, if W6 on truss T2 was identical to W1 on truss T1, W6 would be relabeled W1 on all paperwork. Heart surely advanced the art of optimizing batches, a practice that would gain new significance with linear saws.
Continued next page
PHONE: 800-289-5627
Read/Subscribe online at www.componentadvertiser.com
FAX: 800-524-4982