High-Tech Building Materials

I write a lot about people. So let me diverge a bit and mention all the cool ‘stuff’ that the building materials industry offers, in addition to the awesome people. Why? Because we are constantly being accused of being stale and low-tech.

No, we are not the Silicon Valley. No slides in our offices, no self-driving cars on our lot, and our coffee maker uses paper filters. But low-tech? Not even close.

I’ll offer three examples for your consideration.

First, if you were to tour one of our truss manufacturing facilities, you would see CAD computers everywhere that give renderings not only of each truss, but of an entire framed house that you can utilize on the jobsite to ensure everything is in order. These of course, would be useless without the people running them, but I am not talking about people in this post.

Wilson Lumber Truss Designer Luis Padilla

Second, visit one of our door manufacturing facilities and you can see multiple types of machines that produce higher quality doors faster and safer than just a few years ago. How much more? Today, we could produce almost 1,000 doors in an 8-hour shift if we needed to. That is of course, with all the right people.

Finally - and boy are our people important in this one - at our building materials location we have implemented a warehouse management software that lets us know exactly where every stick of lumber, every special order and every box of nails on the property is located, at the touch of a button.

Now, none of this technology is brand new, I get that. But analog it is not.

We in the building materials world don’t like the bad rap we get for being behind the times. Dang it! There I go talking about people again. I suppose there is no getting away from it.

We have cool toys, but the toys are nothing without the people running them.