A
Th e
Component Manufacturing dverti$er
April 2018 #10225 Page #6
Adverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Wood Components in Multi-Family Housing Part Two: The Turbulent 1980s
F
or CMs to prosper in the 1980s, after surviving the “double-bubble” of apartment building in the 1970s, required great tenacity and innovation. Projects grew in size and complexity. Developers gained momentum and began employing scheduling and project costing software. Tough timelines and “per square foot” costing standards were developed. CMs needed streamlining. Trussway Paves the Way: Entering the 1980s, even as U.S. apartment construction ebbed, Houston’s rocketed to an amazing 42,000 units in 1982. In this market with only 2% of U.S. population, a full 15% of multi-family housing was being built. And Trussway was at its epicenter. Prebuilt components became the key, and not just trusses. To further increase jobsite productivity, Trussway introduced the trussed rough opening, or TRO. This innovation enabled framers to jump start jobs; eliminating the delays while they did the “build-up”; cutting and assembling headers and jacks. A further savings arose from material optimization. On jobsites framers used longer, more costly lumber lengths, while Trussway was able to recycle short cut-offs. As a result, Houston framers readily “gave back” their labor and material savings, which netted Trussway another 25–30% increase in revenue on such projects. To meet developers’ frantic schedules, Trussway also developed a key management tool, the ubiquitous Project Spreadsheet. This tool maximized flexibility in truss production by identifying quantities of identical trusses across an entire project. Site conditions nearly always changed the order in which buildings were erected. In the example herein, if the slab for Building 7 was suddenly poured out of the planned sequence, the truss plant was able to ship the trusses for Buildings 1, 4, or 12. In such “cookie cutter” garden style apartments, framers often stocked trusses by truss type in holding areas nearby, on future phases of construction when available. With this simple spreadsheet, the plant was also able to batch multiple buildings, minimizing setups, while filling available plant capacity. Continued next page
PHONE: 800-289-5627
Read/Subscribe online at www.componentadvertiser.com
FAX: 800-524-4982