The news came down this week that 2022 will be the International Year of Glass! That is tremendous stuff, and should only be good for all of us going forward. I expect a lot more details to come, but as the great leader of this effort, Alicia Duran, noted in her announcement of this happening, “Welcome to the Age of Glass.”
The next generation of window, door and skylight technology will be done in a lab with the most up-to-date thermal performance measuring equipment and predictive performance analysis software.
Are we reaching customers in the most effective way within the new hybrid workforce? Are we adjusting our supply chain to address challenging shipping logistics? How are we adjusting to inflation and cost increases?
We just completed Construction Safety Week, and what was nice was the push for that extra training needed to keep our teams safe in the shop and in the field. While I talk about labor here a ton, I don’t talk enough about the importance of the safety of those who are already working with us. We shouldn’t be cutting corners on safety (or the education and training of it) and really, in fact, should be going all in.
Increasingly high performance is an inevitability. Consumers won’t simply start compromising, nor will regulations go meaningfully backward. Developing the high-performance products to meet those demands requires high-performance technology—much of which already exists in some form today.
Dan Gray, director of sales, Roto North America, sat down with Window + Door in February to discuss current supply chain challenges, logistical considerations and how to work through them.
When your project calls for the natural beauty of wood, but needs the high-performance longevity of aluminum, wood grain finishes can provide the best of both. Textured wood grain finish options mimic not just the look, but also the feel of natural wood.
According to the March 2021 jobs numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. employers went on a massive hiring spree adding 916,000 workers to their payrolls, including 110,000 in construction and 53,000 in manufacturing. This caused the unemployment rate to fall to 6 percent as the labor force participation rate increased. As the U.S. economy continues to reopen, competition for labor will continue to heat up. How can we in the fenestration industry compete with other industries for new workers?
Every few months a complete supply chain update for the building product world is published by Gilbane. It is an excellent resource and for the longest time glass was always listed as “stable” in the three main categories of price, inventories, and deliveries. That is no longer the case as in the latest release glass is now noted as “increasing” under the price category, and “stabilizing” under the other two.
Automation, at its core, is the reduction of human intervention during a given process, such as fabricating a window or flat glass. By employing automation, whether it is at the robot, machine or software level, we as an industry can enhance worker performance, while simultaneously freeing up managers and other workers to focus on tasks that are more important.