Business Logistics

Implementing What You Learned at BCMC: Build an Effective Truss Design Department

  • Before a new truss designer designs their first truss, it’s a good idea to have technicians work as a helper on a truss production team.
  • Understand the personal characteristics, education and knowledge of your plant personnel because often talent is there that is unexplored and unrealized.
  • Training a new designer is an ongoing process that takes time. When you have good designers trained, you will want to do everything you can to keep them employed with you.

Implementing What You Learned at BCMC: Get the Right People & Keep Them

  • The focus should be on developing a system each company can continuously evolve in order to avoid becoming stagnant as the market improves. 
  • In order to bring in qualified people, initially, companies need to define, write out and fine-tune a recruitment process.
  • You need to develop a pipeline of candidates and not wait for the need to arise.  

Implementing What You Learned at BCMC: Plan Where You Are Going

  • In order for a company to grow successfully, it needs to evaluate its current situation and costs accurately and be able to articulate what the company wants to grow into. 
  • To improve production areas, start with the “5S” approach: sort, straighten, scrub/sanitize, schedule and finally, score the result. 
  • The right people, the right customers, the right vendors, and most importantly, the right motives grow a successful business.

Become the “Go-To” Person in Your Market

  • Component manufacturers have to be proactive locally in pursuing those outside the industry, including building officials, members of the fire service, specifiers, framers and lawmakers.
  • It’s not hard to put a value on having eyes and ears like theirs in the market, when they are willing to look out for your business while they’re doing their jobs.
  • The more smoothly the installation of CM products goes, the less issues we have to confront in the field and the less we have to overcome challenging building code provisions, the more builders will want to buy and install our products.

Unifying the Framing Industry Through Safety

  • When it comes to jobsite safety, fragmentation within the construction industry creates obstacles that shouldn’t be there (and don’t have to be).  
  • It’s very difficult for framing companies to develop a consistent culture of safety when the jobsite-specific safety plan changes from jobsite to jobsite.
  • FrameSAFE provides a standardized approach to safety communication and shares universal best practices when it comes to safe behavior and jobsite hazard mitigation.

The Four-Letter Word that Helped My Business

  • Incoming SBCA President Rick Parrino sees a lot of opportunity for the industry to grow and further change the way homes are framed.
  • Parrino shares his experiences getting to know local building officials, giving educational presentations and trying to be a good resource for builders, framers, specifiers, firefighters  and code officials.  
  • Parrino’s goal is to encourage CMs to begin building more relationships with the individuals inside our local markets that can have a big impact on our business.

Top 10 Employee Training Tools: Safety Communication

Safety Communication: Sing the Right Lyrics

Build Your Sales Force

  • The whole premise of NFC is to help the framing industry grow and develop through best practice-based standards.
  • Having a more standardized approach to framing will make the whole building construction process easier.
  • I believe every component manufacturer should get involved in NFC, become a member of this fledgling organization, and help support its mission and objectives.

Knowledge Is Power: Quantifying the Value of SBCRI through SP Design Value Changes

Knowledge is power when it comes to making decisions, so the more knowledge the better. SBCRI unequivocally gives us access to knowledge no one else has.

Top 10 Employee Training Tools: Housekeeping

Cleaning. It’s not sexy, and when a component manufacturer (CM) is cranking out trusses, it’s difficult to switch focus and make sweeping and picking up scraps a priority. However, a few simple housekeeping steps can help bolster a CM’s bottom line, and that is sexy. This article will look at some of the most common areas of the production facility where cleaning can have a big impact and explore easy steps to make it part of a CM company’s culture.