[00:00:00] Speaker A: Southwestern Ontario is a breeding ground for automation experts. Very intelligent men and women that have got a lot of experience in automotive. Traditionally, those expertise translate to any automation program that you might need.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the podcast. I'm on site here at element 5 in St. Thomas and if you've ever listened to the podcast before, you know how exciting it is for me to actually be in a factory and having a podcast recording. And I'd like to welcome Chris Latour. Chris, welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: Thanks, Jim. Appreciate it.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: And Chris, we used to work together at ATS Automation.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: We do, yeah, absolutely. It was a fun time learning all about automation back in the early 2000s and. And seeing that company grow and blossom was phenomenal.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: And you were a programmer back then, but you also did project management at ats.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: I did. I actually started in mechanical design.
I moved over into programming, which was exciting. Gave me a well rounded background. And then I finished off in project management and then moved to London.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Excellent. And of course, I moved to London too, so I'm glad that you took some time to show me around the factory. So can you tell me you've always been in project management or in factory management? And so tell us a little bit more about your background.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: Yeah. So in engineering by trade, mechanical engineering at a Western.
From there I went to ats, where you and I met each other. ATS was a phenomenal spot. You could be in different industries, you could be different machines, different departments. And so I got the benefit. I moved across multiple departments, so I got exposure to mechanical engineering, controls design, electrical design, and then obviously project management.
I was in pharma, automotive, consumer products. So it gave me a well rounded background, which is what I was looking for. From there I moved to London. I worked with GMP engineering. I started their automation division. At that time we were really focused on robotics. That was our thing. And we were trying to be different than every robot manufacturer. So we were trying to do something that was not a palletizer. It was something that was unique and different to the industry. And we did quite well after that. I went off my own. I'm a little bit of an entrepreneur, obviously, in the background.
I spent some time working in forges, different places like that. And then I ended up at the original Cakery. The original Cakery was a great experience. It had two facilities, highly automated cake production, which is a very unique environment because you got the sanitary aspect. You've got a lot of employees that can touch the cake and then you want the cakes to look the same, but they don't have to look perfectly the same. It's a very unique environment.
And then I got fortunate enough through a mentor of mine, I ended up at Element five.
[00:02:54] Speaker B: That's exciting, and I'd love to chat with you more about that sometime. Can you tell us a little bit about element 5 and about structured wood? Because it's kind of a new thing and I'm sitting here in your fantastic building, so I'm going to ask you about your building in a second as well.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: Element 5. We started in 2017 bringing mass timber in from Europe. European mass timber has been around since the early 2000s, and it's grown into a much bigger industry than in North America. So you can really see the vision of where it can go. The primary two components are CLT and Gluam, and we were bringing them in and we were making small businesses and small buildings, and it was a fantastic opportunity. But in 2019, our shareholders challenged us and said, you need to be a big player. There's a lot of demand coming and we need a big site. So we greenfielded the site here in St. Thomas, 170,000 square feet, focused primarily on CLT. And I oversaw the launch of that project and the bringing it up to full capacity of 4 shifts. And then just recently, in the last 18 months, we acquired a new stakeholder with Hochschlacher, which is the largest glulam provider out of Austria. And we put in the most sophisticated glam and grading line that there is in North America.
[00:04:09] Speaker B: That's so exciting. And you started your build here during COVID Absolutely. How was that like?
[00:04:16] Speaker A: It was challenging most days. I think our ability to hire really unique talent, that that was up for any challenge, was one of our things. And that came through partners as well as through our employees. We worked with municipalities trying to find the right way. Obviously, every day was a bit different, but we. We installed the equipment as we built the building, which is not something I'd recommend to anybody. And it was a phenomenal outcome, but not without a taxing amount of work.
[00:04:47] Speaker B: You were telling me when you were putting the equipment in. And we just had a tour of this 350,000 square foot facility, which is unbelievable that you were actually building roofs as you were laying down equipment and laying down the electrical.
[00:05:00] Speaker A: Yeah, we would sit with all the construction suppliers each day who are used to building a building and handing it off, and we'd say to them, we want to put a press in this area, but we don't have roof and we don't have the lights. And we don't have all the other building components installed. Can you start putting them in? And we're going to leave a walkway 20ft away, 30ft away. At that time, we were working with Sierra Construction Pro Electric and they did a phenomenal job of going outside their comfort zone and finding ways around it. And then our team would, would work with the equipment supplier to make sure that the equipment supplier also altered their approach to accommodate the fact that you need access to these spaces and you.
[00:05:39] Speaker B: I think we gotta talk a little bit about St. Thomas, like why you're here and them as a partner.
[00:05:44] Speaker A: St. Thomas has been instrumental for us from day one. Our original goal was to be in close proximity to Toronto, but also in close proximity to the 401 so we could get to the U.S.
the traditional approach is to put mass timber beside the sawmill, the woods right there. Our approach was we can efficiently ship lumber, dimensional lumber, on train or on truck to us by filling those carts.
But when the mass timber goes out to the site, there's window cutouts, there's space, there's a lot less efficiency. So the closer you are to the end site, the better it is for your trucking. And then St. Thomas was just very flexible with us. They were accommodating in terms of giving us options for future growth of land, making sure that they promoted us within the employee base and really just inviting us in as a partner as opposed to somebody that's just buying land and doing a transaction.
[00:06:43] Speaker B: And we have to talk a little bit about St Thomas too, because we call this Railway city or railroad city. I'm not sure.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Yeah, Railway city. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: And why is that important to you?
[00:06:55] Speaker A: So there's two main rails in North America, CN and cp. The mill might be on one, the other or both. And when they ship the lumber, you want to be able to receive it regardless of which railway it sits on. St. Thomas is unique in the fact that those two railways come in and there's a third railway that you can interchange the cars quite easily on and bring them to our site. So we have a rail spur as part of our partnership agreement with Messenger Freight and we can bring the railcars right into messenger freight and have them unloaded.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: So Messenger Freight is a really important partner for you.
[00:07:28] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely critical. When you're building a multi story building and often you're building many at a time. Those loads of trucks are being prepared and the site wants to take them at a certain time, but they're exposed to rain, wind, elements, delays on site. So there's a chance that the truck does not go out on time. You also have to be just in time. So as you're just in time, you need upwards of 80, 90 truckloads of material that are ready for different customers. Messenger freight assists us in storing all that and loading and unloading. And they use an 80 ton straddle crane to make sure that our truckloads are stored properly, they're maintained, they're moisture managed and they're getting to our customers at the right time. And then incoming lumber, the same thing you want the incoming lumber to be brought in. We're bringing 10 truckloads in a week, sometimes more. And as a result, that's obviously a large task for anybody to handle.
[00:08:23] Speaker B: When we're thinking about engineered lumber. And I'm looking at a piece right now that's holding up this, the floor and it's like two by fours, all glued, laminated together. So why is this such an interesting thing right now to builders and architects.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: It really comes down to modern methods of construction. So being able to all the penetrations in for plumbing, electrical, the joint from one piece to another so that it's. It's like an IKEA set on site. And that really speeds things up. Otherwise, when you go to site, there's coordination errors that occur. We're finding those coordination errors earlier because we're creating a full 3D model of the building and we can do interference checks and we can check to see what problems will occur on site and fix them beforehand and then make sure that we make precision elements that go together on site. So for example, I'll send you a truck and it'll have the beams that you're looking at here, but also have the steel plates of all the screws. And it's exactly like an IKEA set. You're going to assemble that and then you're going to ask for the next truck.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: And you have to deliver first floor first. Right. And then second floor second.
[00:09:28] Speaker A: Absolutely. And that sometimes is a challenge because we might not want to produce it in that same order. So we've built into our supply chain the ability to make things in the order that's efficient for us, but ensuring that we delivered in the order that's efficient for you.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: You've taken over too programming load for this facility. Right. And you're working with partners too. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Because I think it's such an interesting use of AI and just in time and inventory management and such.
[00:09:57] Speaker A: Yeah. One of the unique things we have is Southwestern Ontario is a breeding ground for automation experts. Very intelligent men and women that have got a lot of experience in automotive. Traditionally, those expertise translate to any automation program that you might need.
So we brought in a lot of experts in different areas. PLC programming, MES programming and AI. This is a little bit of a byproduct of COVID but we had to own the installation of the equipment because we couldn't bring people in with their quarantines and various challenges.
So with that, we really own the software part of it, obviously with partners like mpi, who's been a critical partner to us. But that also gives us the ability to own it and improve that process as we go forward on the new Glulam line. We wrote our own software, which is a big task and very unique, and we based it off of our Austrian partners and our parent group. But we wrote something that I'm really proud of and I think is very unique and gives us an edge on competition of just buying a third party that might not exactly fit what we're looking for.
[00:11:06] Speaker B: And tell us a little bit about the machinery you have. Like, it's astounding and I'm not easily impressed, but wow, what a facility. Lots of presses, lots of mills, lots of cutting tools.
What do they sound like and look like?
[00:11:20] Speaker A: We've got a lot of conveyors which you and I walked around and saw. We've got an X ray system that X rays the boards and does vision checks. So we do over 20 different vision checks to make sure that the wood is being used in the most efficient way. So if a lumber, a piece of lumber comes to us and we mark it as a number two board out of the mill, we might actually be a little more granular in our inspection of it to make sure it gets used properly. We have a lot of planers, so we plane a lot. We have a lot of cutting tools. We have our own sharpening system. In our maintenance group. We've got an RF press which we saw running today, which was always an exciting thing to showcase. We got band saws, and we've got the fanciest CNCs out there. So one of the things that we feel is if you really want to properly support your customers, you have to build a machine. Complex shapes.
The best example I can give is right now, if you go downtown Toronto. The new CAMH building is being built for the center of Addiction and Mental Health. It is a stunning building. There's curved surfaces on every piece of CLT that's in there. And we are one of the few people that could really deliver that at volume.
[00:12:31] Speaker B: What does CLT stand for? For those people who don't know?
[00:12:34] Speaker A: Absolutely. So CLT is cross laminated timber. The lumber is crossed in 90 degree directions on each layer, which provides the rigidity and the strength. And it's generally a floor or a wall. And then glulam. All the lumber is in the same direction and it's used for a beam or a column.
[00:12:51] Speaker B: I made a joke when we were just sitting down here and I said, oh, by the way, you're not responsible for sales because you're just the factory. Right. And actually you're now president and now you are responsible for sales.
[00:13:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm responsible end to end. As president, I've been very fortunate to be given that opportunity. And the best thing that we did over the last five years is we built up our team. So when I moved into president, a number of people moved to new roles. It was almost a flawless transition. Everybody was well prepared. They knew the systems, they knew what we did. And it was a seamless shift of everybody into new leadership roles.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: When we sat down here, I kind of asked, oh, you're the president and congratulations. But I said, but you're not responsible for sales, are you? And you said, yes.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: Yeah. So I've taken over end to end. And we had a seamless shift because we built up our team over the last few years and everybody was really prepared for that upcoming shift that would eventually happen. So it's been quite a seamless thing. And then often the first question that comes out of that is the cost around mass timber. One of the things that is often a topic conversation is, are you cheaper? And it really comes down to what are you trying to build. So there's hybrid approaches, there's full mass timber. It's not always the full solution, but it's often cases it is a strong component of it.
The first question we often get is to compare a bid of concrete and steel to a bid of wood. But we say you really have to look at the end to end process because you are moving off site. And when you move off site, there's benefits that you're going to get that are not easily measurable. If you don't look at all the change orders, the delays, do you get people in beds faster than with traditional methods, which we believe you often do? So the example we give is we built a four story building in Kitchener Waterloo for the ywca.
They built the foundation and we erected the structure of the building in 19 days. When you look at the benefit of getting the trades in faster, not having them faced with delays that lead to extra costs for them and eventually for the builder. And you get people into beds faster. There is an inherent savings with that.
[00:15:08] Speaker B: You mentioned an example while we were doing our tour about New York City.
[00:15:13] Speaker A: Yeah. New York City is an interesting restriction. And Toronto's the same in that there's certain times that you can start work because you wake up your neighbors. There's limitations on traffic. You can't just lead to more traffic. So in New York, we're very popular because we bring the trucks in the night before they're staged. They're ready. The crew shows up at the time that they're allowed to start using the crane, they start putting everything into place. They have a very efficient day. And at the end of the day, they remove the truck that was there, it's now empty. They bring new trucks in, and they're ready to go. If you think about traditional concrete truck, the first concrete truck shows up. You're trying to time the second concrete truck. There could be traffic delays, there could be heat delays, restrictions on noise, et cetera. And you're trying to finish at a specific time. So it's a very limiting and challenging environment to be in.
[00:16:07] Speaker B: And on the tour, we also saw some of the key ways or kind of. Can you explain to the audience what that might be? Some of these details that exist in a floor or wall that is preplanned?
[00:16:18] Speaker A: Yeah. So one of the biggest things that our clients have to do is they have to plan what we call the mep. So that's the mechanical and electrical penetrations. So you think of a building, there's a plumbing pipe that goes from the first floor to the second floor to the third floor. There's electrical conduit, H Vac, there's all sorts of things. In a traditional build, the mechanical plumber, say, for example, runs a pipe, and they're five inches off of where they should have been. But then now the H Vac shows up and the plumbing pipe's in the way. So you're faced with, do I move the plumbing pipe? Do I move the H Vac? What do I do? A lot of people get involved. There's delays, there's decisions, there's cost. We plan that out ahead of time. It's all in the 3D model. The hole is CNC'd into it. So when the plumber comes across, they know exactly where they have to run that pipe. It's gotta take 90 degrees and go up through the hole. There is no alternative to it. So you have a benefit that's just not measurable up front, but you will definitely measure it after you've done the first building.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: So on your tour. And your tour is fantastic. And I used to tour ATS all the time and take people through. It's just a stunning example of how beautiful and how many different uses you can have for clt. Who's your bullseye customer? I'm kind of assuming that once an architect's uses your product, they're like, wow.
[00:17:34] Speaker A: Yeah. So we try to get a conversation early and upfront with the developer and the architect, and we're. We're trying to find a conversation that we can have where we can explain the efficiencies that we can have gained. We want to do that before the building's design, and it's too late to make those changes. So our ideal customer is a design team of an architect, a developer, hopefully a general contractor is in there, and we're doing what we call a design build. So the design build is that team is sitting together and saying, what is your vision and what is the most efficient way to get that vision? So that could be that we make the panels a certain size, could be that we do the connections a certain way. Maybe we don't do the engineering, maybe we do the engineering. It's hard to say. But we want to make sure that vision becomes reality. And the best way to do it is to have all the stakeholders at the table. As opposed to a bid process where somebody makes a decision, it goes out for bid, it's not as efficient as it could be, and now it's too late to make the change, right?
[00:18:36] Speaker B: No. Well, it's. To me, I think the beauty and the fact that these things are easy to build and easier to get into makes it for sure a win win. How about your talent? You'd mentioned to me you have 190 employees or so.
[00:18:52] Speaker A: Yeah, we're a little over 190 employees. We. We grow at an extremely fast speed. In 2019, we were six. So it's quite the jump. You can imagine the one thing that we've really focused on is find people that are really engaged, maybe they don't have. I mean, we're in St. Thomas. We're not exactly in the wood capital of the world. So finding people with mass timber experience is not likely there. But if you find skilled, engaged people, it's amazing what they can accomplish. And the team that we've built is a wide spectrum. We've got people from Aerospace, automation, automotive, all sorts of areas. We didn't know about wood, but we were open to learning and we were willing to blend the knowledge that we had with the knowledge we could learn to really bring ourselves forward. And we made some mistakes. And now with Hoshlocker, it's really unique because They've got over 100 years of sawmilling and wood backgrounds. So we do exchanges back and forth with employees where we can expose them to mass timber, to saw milling, and they can trade phone numbers with these people so that they can call each other and take out the middleman of management.
So, for example, there's a young gentleman that came over here from Hosh Hawker. He was a press operator. Him and our press operator. Now. We sent them out for lunches, for dinners, for beers. They ran operations together and now they know each other and they can text back and forth. I have this issue. Here's a picture. What do you recommend?
[00:20:23] Speaker B: It's so exciting to be able to kind of build up a workforce that is so talented and so engaged.
So do you. You don't have any problems recruiting talent? Because I think a lot of people are very interested in what's happening here.
[00:20:36] Speaker A: Yeah, we have a lot of people that are interested and when they meet people in our environment, they realize the culture is so important to us and that attracts more talent. You start having people come and say, I know this colleague, I used to work with them. I vouch for them. They're really quite talented and they're interested in coming here. When you have a full circle like that, it's amazing what you can accomplish.
[00:21:00] Speaker B: And so you must tour a lot of people because this is like I saw. Thank you for the tour again.
So who are you touring? Are you touring a lot of politicians, people in the industry, architectural firms?
[00:21:12] Speaker A: It's a wide spectrum. So obviously engineers and architects are a primary. We want to bring them in. We want to show them our mass timber office, show them the connections they can do and show them the manufacturing side of things so they can get confident that we are going to deliver what we promised to deliver. Politicians are a big one. We've been very well supported by the province of Ontario and by the federal government. Build Canada has come out with a mass timber initiative driven by our Prime Minister. We are going to play a part in that because we are one of the biggest providers and we're extremely proud to have that opportunity. So we tour a lot of politicians to showcase what we can do, the advantages we can bring to the industry, and then just a lot of advocates. So the Canadian Wood Council, various advocates that really want to bring things forward. And that might not necessarily be in CLT and Glulam, but but it can be in all the different wood life cycle items that exist and can exist. You know, that could be pellet manufacturing. That can be really the whole ecosystem that exists around wood.
[00:22:16] Speaker B: And you're very sustainable. Like there's not a scrap of wood laying around this place. Right.
[00:22:20] Speaker A: We're very particular about waste. Every kilogram of wood is worth something to us. We're very particular about that. That's history of our AI program was really how to drive down our wood waste. Because the one unique thing about us compared to other mass timber suppliers is we buy our wood from the market. That wood fluctuates with the price of the commodity and we are exposed to those commodity prices. When you're exposed to prices that in Covid quadrupled, you learn really quickly not to waste lumber. So we are very particular about finding as many opportunities as we can. And our operators are the core of that. They will point out everything that you can, you can find and give you opportunities to save that which, when you create that circle, that's the best way to engage everyone.
[00:23:08] Speaker B: You know, one of the things we talked about on the tour is finger joining. Right. So that you're not wasting wood, but also making sure that a wood knot, like a knot in a tree, does not be part of the finger joining. And your AI takes care of that and your operators do too, right?
[00:23:21] Speaker A: Absolutely. After x raying and scanning, we paint lines on the board for the ideal cut point for that wood, making sure the wood's being used in the right spot and we're removing the defects. The operators then have a visual check where they can remove more or less whatever they think. And they measure their performance by how much wood is coming out the other end versus how much wood they put in. And then making sure that we reclaim anything that didn't go to expectations. So if the fingers, during a changeover, we output a piece of wood, they will cut the fingers off and they will put it back on the infeed and, and it'll go through the same process and we'll only have lost that little bit of wood where the fingers were.
[00:24:02] Speaker B: And you, you also control a lot of your sawdust too. Right. So it goes, it goes right out of the building.
[00:24:07] Speaker A: Absolutely. Everything is on two dust collector systems. All the wood cutoffs go into grinders. They get ground up, they get put into auger trailers. And we have a partner Proactive waste that takes it and makes sure that it's being used for the best possible way, whether that be for land landfill, coatings could be for animal bedding, it could be for pellet manufacturing. They've got a lot of different options, but they're making sure to get the best use of that. And then we're trying to obviously minimize how much we put into that waste stream.
[00:24:37] Speaker B: And so what are your next phases of growth? Is it because I know you've kind of got some options on land here too, in case you need. In case you need it.
[00:24:44] Speaker A: Yeah. So putting in a brand new glass wine. Our focus for the next two years is to get that to as high a capacity as we possibly can.
That's for shift operation is the goal. With that, we also want to take our CLT operation. We want to put some capital investments that allow us to increase the volume on that as well. We believe in our conversations with all of our partners from Canada builds all through to the architects. More off site assembly is the key to success for everybody. So that's applying vapor bear, applying insulation building wall assemblies or providing the components to partners that do those things for us. The more we can do off site, the faster these buildings will go up and the faster we'll get people in beds.
[00:25:26] Speaker B: You know, I was kind of surprised when I, when you talked to me about assembly and I'm like, Chris, do you ever miss assembly? Because of course we used to do a lot of that at ats, but it's so it's fascinating that these end customers want you to do more value added work.
[00:25:41] Speaker A: Yeah. And the construction industry has a wide spectrum of complexities. So you think back to a lot of things we automated.
There's very rigid standards which limit the number of iterations construction buildings. There's an endless number of visions that the architects, the engineers, the developers, the owners might have, which leads to different complexities. So fully automating volumetric modules is an option, but it does limit what you can deliver. So you can't.
[00:26:12] Speaker B: Can't automate everything.
[00:26:13] Speaker A: You can't automate everything. So we believe though there's a combination of automation and semi automation is what we call it, where the automation assists the operator in doing something faster, safer, more efficiently and hitting tight tolerances. And that's where our flat pack program really works, is we will automate what makes sense.
[00:26:33] Speaker B: Chris, this has been a fantastic tour and a really, really interesting conversation and a great time to reconnect. Have we forgotten to talk about anything?
[00:26:40] Speaker A: I think just in general Coming to the site and talking to our experts is one of the best events we can have and we can bring you to clients. Our clients are very open about the different buildings they had, the successes, the challenges that they might have. So touring mass timber buildings, touring them with the partners is always important, really. Getting your mass timber suppliers in your design team earlier allows you to gain as many efficiencies as possible. We're trying to make sure to put everybody in the most successful approach. And I'm very partnership driven. So, I mean, you and I talked about as we go through, I named dozens of partners that have been so critical to our success. And I believe that it's the same downstream. So if anybody wants to get hold of us, obviously LinkedIn, we're very prominent. You can always come to our factory. You can reach out to us on element 5co.
You can always come and visit us at the factory and we'll show you a great tour.
[00:27:38] Speaker B: And again, thank you so much for taking the time this morning and I appreciate it.
[00:27:43] Speaker A: Thank you for having me.
[00:27:44] Speaker B: I'd like to acknowledge A three the association for Advancing Automation. They are the leading automation trade association for robotics, vision and imaging, motion control and motors, and the industrial artificial intelligence technologies. You can Visit
[email protected] and if you'd like to get in touch with us at the Robot Industry podcast, you can find me Jim Beretta on LinkedIn. Today's podcast was produced by Customer Attraction Industrial Marketing. And I'd like to thank my team, Chris Gray for the music, Jeffrey Bremner for audio production, my business partner Janet, and our sponsors, Earhart Automation and Mecademic Robotics.
