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Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
March 2022 #14272 Page #43
Adverti$$er
Has More Automation Resulted in Too Little Information to the Truss Builder? By Glenn Traylor
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oday’s technology has made life easier for the truss designer and others in the truss fabrication process. In the early days of the truss industry, we used, reused, and modified existing designs to create new designs using paper, pencil, and a handy Smoley’s Book. Soon we graduated to line input, sending our design requirements to a mainframe computer that would create our cutting. We would get our drawings back by fax machine or UPS. This led the way to PCs giving us the tools to design from the office. Our HP pen plotters hummed with action, creating our drawings right before our eyes. With additional RAM and speed, we created our own truss drawings using DOS, Windows, and then integrated software. The power of computers led us to sending files to automated saws that set up angles and lengths in the order we wanted the lumber cut. It was a major advancement of technology. We started out designing one truss at a time and now with the proper software we could design one house at a time. The innovations of sending cutting to an automated saw reduced errors and sped up production. Compared to the early days of the truss industry, we had traveled light-years. Fortunately or unfortunately, we’ve also created a mountain of paperwork. Attempts have been made to reduce this, despite the reluctance of many component manufacturers to abandon having a piece of paper in hand for certain tasks. Our powerful computers and database management allows us to address the paperwork challenge as we leverage our electronic capabilities. But, with this new technology and a dedication to eliminating paper, could we be losing verification intervals that used to be built into the process? Why hasn’t technology with proper documentation been applied to other areas of the industry? What is holding us back? If we were to have a discussion with industry leaders, some would press the importance of documentation. Others would say paperless is the goal without concern for documentation. Is there a way to document without generating paper? On a recent audit of a truss plant’s in-house Quality Assurance program, I witnessed a situation that should not have happened and probably would not have in the “old days” when multiple checks would have prevented it from occurring. The truss builder was building a truss with No.3 lumber in a web that required No.2 southern pine. Upon inspection, we saw the bottom chord also had No.3 stamped on it. Looking around, I realized that the builder had nothing around him, no paperwork and no screens that showed him lumber grade requirements. He had a laser helping him position Continued next page
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