As we head into the busiest time of the year, fabricators are thankfully reporting that there are no major supply chain issues. However, one thing to keep in mind is the importance of preventative maintenance (PM). Over the last few years of pandemic induced “off the chart” levels of demand, many production managers did not […]

During the pandemic, door and window fabricators lost many of their key people as fears of working in close quarters, coupled with government payouts, made working in a manufacturing plant much less desirable. Fabricators struggled to find people and employee turnover was an ongoing issue. The result was that a great deal of fabrication knowledge […]

It probably goes without saying that door and window manufacturers learned a lot in the past few years, as we dealt with the pandemic and its aftereffects. Supply chain issues, hot demand, sky-high lead times … you probably don’t need me to remind you. We worked through it together. And amidst these challenges, there was […]

During the last few years of the pandemic, we saw numerous plant workers walk off the job never to return. We also saw the government paying workers to stay home if they felt unsafe on the job. Many of these workers never returned to their jobs, either. The investment made in their on-the-job knowledge and […]

Over the last few years, the pandemic has given our industry unprecedented growth. It also has led to many great opportunities for all of us. When business was growing at historic rates, experimentation with lead generation was plentiful and we were all still finding ways to get new customers. Whether on the retail side or […]

February opened on a week of mixed feelings for attendees of the National Association of Home Builders’ (NAHB) International Builders Show (IBS). With more than 110,000 professionals cross pollenating between IBS and the Kitchen & Bath Industry Show, the scene was busy and jubilant—marking Design & Construction Week’s largest attendance ever. “I’ve been to more […]

Forecasts are tough. Don’t you just love it when the weatherman calls for a 50% chance of rain? How can he be right? How can he be wrong? So, let’s talk about the forecast for the door and window industry. Overall, 2022 proved to be a very good year with most door and window fabricators […]

According to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB)/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI) builder sentiment fell for the 10th straight month in October and traffic of prospective buyers fell to its lowest level since 2012 (excluding the two-month period in the spring of 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic). The association attributes the […]

Who’s the most knowledgeable person on your plant floor? Who’s the person you turn to when a problem arises? Is that person the same one it might have been two years ago? The fenestration industry’s ongoing struggle with labor is well established. A lot of focus is commonly put on simply being short on manpower. […]

The latest Producer Price Index (PPI) from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) dropped this week and it shows prices for materials used in door and window manufacturing continued to increase across the board, not only from January to February 2022, but on a year-over-year basis as well, even if the increases weren’t as […]