A
Th e
Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
February 2020 #12247 Page #29
Possible 30 Days Savings for the Home Builder Using Wall Panels Todd Drummond
D
id you know that, even though setting wall panels saves an average of eleven days compared to traditional stickframing of walls, the overall home completion can have an average savings of 30 days when wall panels have been used? For the home builders, every day a home is completed sooner can be a savings of $250 to $1,000 per day. This faster completion rate can mean more home sales with the additional cost savings for the home builders. However, too many new and existing wall panel manufacturers are making too many overall project process errors to garner these gains. If you are a wood truss component manufacturer (CM), wall panels can certainly help grow your sales while helping the home builder control the overall home building costs and shorten the home completion time. The simple fact is that wall panels can offer far more margin dollars than selling units of lumber while creating a dependency relationship with the builders for your services. This definitely can be a win-win for both the CM and the home builder. Historically, wall panels have had a cyclical boom and bust as the availability of labor coincided with the building economy. Because of the current and future declining labor demographics for construction and other industries, factory assembly, which includes wall panels, seems to have reached critical momentum and has gained market acceptance in most regions of the country that appears to be enduring for the foreseeable future. Most of the market acceptance is being driven by necessity to manage field framing labor constraints. If you are a home developer with multiple projects being built each month, wall panels can be far more valuable to growing sales and reducing costs than you possibly could have imagined. At first glance, it seems evident that framing walls inside a manufacturing building either on wood tables or some automation should be straightforward. As a wood truss and wall panel operations guru, I can attest that wall panel manufacturing is not merely moving standard wall framing practices indoors to garner the gains you are hoping to achieve. Approximately 80% of the wall panel
Continued next page
PHONE: 800-289-5627
Read/Subscribe online at www.componentadvertiser.com
FAX: 800-524-4982