Alpha Building Center Adds Truss Division

In an effort to keep up with the needs of area construction companies, Alpha Building Center in Shipshewana has constructed a new near-fully automated truss facility.

"Everybody deciding they need trusses in just LaGrange and Elkhart County and two or three vendors, they went from three-week wait times to seven in the course of a week," said Alpha Building Center CEO Kyle Ulrich. "In order to stay ahead of it and keep our customers happy, we needed to control some of ours and their destinies.

The truss factory can build up to 60 feet right now, so they are still working with the companies they worked with before buying other products from them.

The new truss factory opened mid-September, and just a few days later the tornado ripped through LaGrange County, inundating them with work as a chicken barn was destroyed and they needed new trusses for the property.

The new 35,000-square-foot factory built by DJ Construction, is mostly automated, with the entire facility designed to be run by just 12 people. Ulrich said right now, there are only three employees in the factory and three employees in the office but they can still take around 20 orders per week, with one order being the equivalent of an entire house's worth of trusses.

One machine automatically picks lumber based on size requirements and feeds it into the saw.

The facility can build both roof trusses and floor trusses, and the automated system doesn't leave much behind. As it sorts through the wood, cutting to fit the necessary size for custom projects, it also focuses on ensuring maximum usage. Anything leftover from the roof trusses is saved for the floor trusses. Ulrich said, there's generally not more than a few inches of crap wood after the machines are through it with. An employee is needed to man the saw for safety.