Tech Talk, with Louws Truss
With four Washington state locations, Louws Truss has served the Pacific Northwest as a truss manufacturer for 70 years. Third-generation owner and President B.J. Louws doesn’t claim to be a technology guy, but his Burlington, Washington-based company is certainly pushing at the high-tech boundaries with a fully robotic truss manufacturing system, installed in 2022.
B.J. Louws spoke with HBSDealer on a number of tech-related topics:
On robots in the truss plant: We were one of the first in the country to implement the sort of line that we have. We’ve got robots placing plates onto lumber and then being assembled by an even bigger robot with lasers and automated jigging and all that kind of stuff. And we’re going to be installing a second robotic line later on this year, so we're moving forward on this technology.
ROI of robotics: Yeah, it is expensive, but a lot of things are expensive now. So I’ve been interested in advanced manufacturing, robotics, lean manufacturing for a long time.
And our company has invested in the cutting-edge technology for a long time. Obviously we’re looking at our return on investment. I’m not in business as a charity. We want to make money and we want to have a return. And we think that this technology makes us more competitive in the marketplace.
The origin story: Before we invested in robotics, we had essentially reached the end of the line of advances in equipment that was available in the truss industry. That’s when we looked at what else was available globally.
We took a trip to Australia in 2018 to see some integration of some European robotics with U.S. truss manufacturing equipment. We spent a couple weeks out there touring plants. And then the next year we met the guys from House of Design out of Boise, Idaho, who were doing robotic integration.
And coming through COVID, where labor was super challenging, and then being on the West Coast just outside of Seattle in a competitive labor market, and looking at how we can stabilize our crews and stabilize our output and improve our quality and all that. It made sense for us.
The labor situation: Labor is a big deal. When you look at demographics in the United States, it seems that the labor situation isn’t going to get any better, though there will be ebbs and flows. In the 1980s and into the early 2000s, the U.S. was adding 1.5 million to 2 million people per year into the labor force. In the mid 2010s, that dropped into the 500,000 range, and we’re negative now. That situation doesn’t look like it’s going to be changing as boomers are retiring and a smaller population is coming into the workforce. So that was a big factor.
Quality control: The plate placement that we get on the robotic system is better than we can do manually. Of course, with any wood construction, we’re dealing with a variable product. So the robot can place perfectly, but the wood varies. So any sort of technology in our industry is trying to figure out how you deal with that variability in lumber. And we thought that this was a good application.
Tech and intelligence: I think that if any company isn’t thinking about technology, they’re going to get behind very quickly. We’re thinking about AI in a big way across our organization right now. I’m not an expert in it, but I know enough about it to say that we’re in a race to figure it out with everybody else, whether we want to be or not.
On competing as an independent: The advantage we have is this: we can implement technology faster than these larger companies can. Smaller businesses are just more nimble to changes in the marketplace, I think. That’s kind of like a small business’ superpower. If we have a good idea, we can start working on it today or tomorrow. We don’t have to go get approval for it. So I think that makes us nimble.