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Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$$er
January 2024 #16294 Page #132
The Last Word Serving the Most Deserving
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special opportunity to help special people exists near most truss plants, as was discovered independently by both Richard Pedde and me. This Joe Kannapell, P.E. “find” has turned out to be such a blessing to Richard that he constantly chides himself for passing by this resource twice a day for seven years without stopping. But fortunately, his staffing struggles got him through the front door of the Cleveland (County) Vocational Industries, and there he found a group of dedicated, but disadvantaged, workers engaged in multiple meaningful tasks. After a brief tour and discussions with the facility manager, he began to formulate a plan to employ these workers for his truss plant, Rafters and Walls LLC, just outside the Charlotte, North Carolina Metro area. Richard had long been bothered by the many hours his truss builders would have to spend taking plates from boxes and stacking them on truss tables ahead of assembly. This task was especially time consuming when they had to dig through tumble-packed boxes. He thought initially that the Cleveland facility’s workers could come to his plant to perform this work. However, he quickly realized that these folks are best served by working in a controlled environment in what is known as a sheltered workshop, in a facility set up to best harness their capabilities. Richard then procured multiple color-coded and properly sized bins for Cleveland’s workers so that they could create manageable units of plates for his truss builders. And this repackaging work was right in line with other repetitive tasks then being carried out at the shelter.
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