The partnership between House of Design and Alpine, an ITW Company, is focused on helping clients address the challenges in the component manufacturing industry – labor and demand. The foundation of our truss system solution is robotics, helping deliver consistent production capabilities while also allowing component manufacturers to scale during spikes in demand.
House of Design’s Automated Roof Truss System is progressive while seamlessly integrating with how building components have been produced for decades. The system will help advance component manufacturers forward without departing too far from the current process. House of Design is committed to using existing equipment and layouts such as the Alpine AutoSet Plus Tables to provide the easiest path to automation. The truss assembly systems are also designed to reduce the risk of downtime. Although robots rarely skip a beat, maintenance is necessary to ensure continuous production. Our systems are designed to allow personnel to takeover and keep production humming.
System Walk-Through
The automated roof truss system is collaborative, creating the most efficient use of both manual and robotic labor. Members are cut, kitted, and transported by an operator who loads multiple truss members on the manual infeed table. The system automatically indexes each member into the preplate station.
The preplate station picks required connector plates and delivers them to the press for accurate placement in the sequenced member. Preplated members are picked and placed in a layout on the table. Members with connector plates on the bottom are placed first, and members preplated on the top are placed last. An operator performs a quality control check, ensuring any gaps in joints are minimal. It is a quick process that doesn’t slow production and confirms quality standards are met. Once all members are in place, the truss is auto pressed and ejected to the finish press. This technology improves employee safety while reducing waste and maximizing production time.
House of Design’s Preplate Station: Reduce the potential for pick errors which result in material waste and lost production time.
Dynamic Drag & Drop Programming
House of Design’s TEd (Truss Editor) Software sequences the order of trusses being built. Designers utilize the easy-to-use graphical interface to layout the desired truss design without the need to learn or perform coding. The software will re-sequence for optimal layout and cycle time while the robots are automatically reprogrammed in real time. TEd allows customers flexibility in both the design and size of the product produced. Customers are not limited to a specific set of pre-programmed products. The innovation of TEd provides endless design possibilities and a wide range of statistics and performance metrics.
Solutions Supporting Employee Safety & Retention
House of Design and Alpine are addressing safety issues through automation. Robots help with heavy lifting, manipulate material, and complete repetitive tasks. As a result, safer and more rewarding positions are created. These positive changes in the plant environment will assist companies in attracting and retaining the best candidates in limited labor pools.
Robots Help Provide Higher Capacity & Output
Robots may fill the 20–30% labor shortfall most component manufacturers are experiencing. This reality may provide scalability opportunities that manufacturers haven’t been able to count on before. Having automation in your arsenal can help your company take advantage of unprecedented market demand.