This year has been filled with ups, downs and many renewed connections. We resumed some face-to-face get-togethers, travelled to tradeshows and leaned on each other to work our way through business booms, supply chain challenges and a shortage of labor.

So, as we close out 2021, I think it’s important to reflect on where we have been and anticipate where we are headed. We covered a lot of ground together, so I’d like to share the five most-read blogs from the year—and preview some of the trends I believe will be most important to our businesses as we enter 2022.

1. Three Ways to Shore Up Your Business This Winter, posted January 2021

We are ending the year much like it began as we continue to look for ways to refine our businesses, maneuver ups and downs and make the most of what downtime we might have this time of year. This blog covers everything from training and strengthening safety protocols and how to protect your quality, even when tightening your belts.

2. Addressing Energy Consumption in Older and Historic Buildings, posted March 2021

How can you tell if a commercial building is inefficient? New York City implemented a new rule requiring multifamily, nonresidential and public or government buildings greater than 25,000 square feet to post an A-F letter grade based on the building’s Energy Star score. Read more about where this trend is headed across the U.S. and our industry’s challenge to deliver performance without disrupting the aesthetic integrity of an existing, culturally significant building.

3. Maintaining Performance Long After Installation, Posted May 2021

This is an evergreen topic for the commercial glass industry as we are always evaluating the initial performance of our products to meet increasingly strict building codes. But what happens to performance during and after installation can be just as important. In this blog, I look at installation, training and the importance of simplified assembly and installation processes, especially amid the ongoing labor shortage.

4. Focusing on What We Can Control Moving Forward, Posted August 2021

As I mentioned, this year brought back opportunities to meet face to face and even attend tradeshows. But how can you afford time away for networking when there’s so much going on it’s hard just to keep up with demand? Here, I offer four tips to maximize your time, while still finding time to learn about new products and industry trends.

5. Built for the Future: Resiliency and Efficiency go Hand in Hand, September 2021

The AIA defines resilience as “The ability of a system and its component parts to anticipate, absorb, accommodate, or recover from the effects of a hazardous event in a timely and efficient manner, including through ensuring the preservation, restoration, or improvement of its essential basic structures and functions.” How does commercial glazing affect building resiliency? Read this blog for more information.

Looking Forward

The topics we covered this year in Commercial Commentary are still very much relevant today and will be well into the new year. But what else will we be tracking in the coming months?

• Automation for all sizes. In speaking with my colleagues, smaller to midsized companies will be compelled to look at automation to help offset demands and boost quality.
• Increased focus on logistics. Ongoing supply issues will force companies to place their focus on adapting to a new reality. This means optimizing inventory, reducing waste wherever possible and assessing production capabilities. I expect to see more time put into creating logistical efficiencies.
• Continued focus on energy efficiency. We’ll see more new legislation and increasingly stringent building code requirements to reduce emissions and improve performance of commercial structures—and the need to continuously improve our offerings to customers.

Until then, I wish you all a happy and healthy holiday season. Looking forward to seeing you in 2022!

Toward the end of my post last month, I noted that our industry’s journey toward delivering increasingly efficient glass solutions for new buildings will most likely require the application of new and emerging technologies. Staying innovative in this way is something fabricators can’t lose sight of, despite some of the other challenges our industry has faced for the past year and a half.

There’s something else there I left unexplored. Adopting cutting-edge technologies to meet new codes and keep up with demand requires certain skill sets to leverage that new technology. Making a switch from metallic spacer systems to high-performing warm-edge systems, for example, requires the right knowledge to fabricate high-quality commercial insulating glass (IG) units properly. The installation of a high-speed line and shifting from manual to automated production require a similar shift in thinking and skills. Proper education is necessary to make sure these types of solutions are brought online correctly—because even if you’re utilizing high-performing components, they’ll only perform up to standard if they’re implemented correctly.

Developing these kinds of skill sets requires an organizational commitment to continuous education and training among your workforce. Training can, however, sometimes feel like a necessity that’s impossible to keep on top of. Considering the rates of plant floor turnover these days, it’s possible only 50% of a line operating team you trained in April is still working on your plant floor. You may have needed to fill the gaps with temps, or perhaps your supervisors have jumped in to perform some of the manual assembly work.

But no matter who is assembling units, it’s essential those people are equipped with the necessary skills to do so effectively. Some of my recent conversations got me thinking about a few things commercial fenestration pros should be considering as we head into the winter months:

Train your entire teams. Shop floor technicians and line operators are your first line of defense against poor quality, so it can be easy to focus training initiatives largely on these teams. But investing in training for all of your plant staff, including supervisors, can be a good insurance policy.

Here’s why: Instilling a greater depth of technical assembly knowledge among your supervisory staff means they’ll be able to teach new recruits properly and will be able to reliably step into an assembly role if the situation calls for it. Additionally, investing in training for your supervisors makes longer-term sense, given that these are roles that are not as vulnerable to high turnover as line operators. By making sure you’re thoroughly training your higher-level staff on the best practices of IG assembly, you’re ensuring that the right knowledge is already in place even if it’s been tough to staff your line reliably.

Use downtime strategically. Given the pace of demand in recent months, “downtime” may seem like something strange and foreign to many commercial fabricators.

But it does happen. We’re entering the winter months, a traditionally slower period for building and construction. Or perhaps you’re waiting longer than expected on a glass shipment. These are opportunities to build knowledge throughout the shop floor. Here, nothing formal is necessarily required—maybe it’s a quick 30-minute refresher on spacer application. Perhaps it’s a lunch and learn, where your staff will appreciate a hot meal along with the opportunity to grow their skill sets. Or maybe it’s a cross-training exercise, where teams from two separate departments gain a deeper understanding of what it takes to carry out the tasks of their counterparts.

All of these can be valuable, particularly as your organization looks to bring new technologies online and rapidly innovate to succeed in an evolving industry. If you have any training tips you’ve found to be successful on your shop floor, I’d love to hear them. Drop me a line at Joe.Erb@Quanex.com.

Joe Erb is a commercial sales specialist for Quanex.