Message from Tyler
Over the past 20+ years of my career specializing in slat replacement, I found myself having the same conversation over and over:
“How much time do I have left?”
My answer was always, “I don’t have that crystal ball.”
But after more than 1,000,000 pig spaces of slat replacement and five times that in inspections, I realized something:
I do have that crystal ball—at least in a data-driven sense. While I can’t predict the exact day a barn floor will fail, I can determine where a building is in its life cycle and how it compares to others. That insight led to the creation of Slat Vision.
Slat Vision was designed to bring objectivity, consistency, and clarity to slated floor assessments. The system captures detailed condition data, compares barns across a standardized baseline, and delivers actionable insights to inform safety and capital spending decisions.
What Makes Slat Vision Different?
Condition Phases:
Traditional inspections used a simple green/yellow/red scale. Slat Vision introduces a more granular five-phase life cycle:
- Like New: The Floor appears nearly identical to its installation condition.
- Good: Early signs of wear, no structural cracking.
- Fair: The most common stage; is when early structural cracks begin to appear.
- Poor: Widespread structural cracking; this is the replacement threshold. Over 90% of slat replacements occur in this phase.
- Failure: Extremely dangerous. Immediate action is required.
The Baseline:
We developed an industry-wide baseline that shows the expected life cycle of slated floor systems. With it, you can compare a specific barn’s aging process against the industry norm to see if it’s wearing faster or slower than expected.
Key Indicators:
Slats, beams, columns, and bearing surfaces all follow predictable patterns of degradation. By documenting which components are in which stage of life, we build a comprehensive condition profile of the floor system.
The Rating System:
Using the condition data, Slat Vision generates an overall barn score based on the health of major components. This score enables you to rank and prioritize barns across your system using objective, comparable metrics.
Information Housing:
We recognized a major gap: most companies lack a central, accessible location for inspection reports. Slat Vision offers a solution—an organized data system for storing past inspections and supporting long-term planning and budgeting.
A New Standard for Slat Inspections
I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve built. Slat Vision is more than just a name—it’s the embodiment of my vision for the future of slat system inspections. By combining decades of hands-on experience with objective, data-driven insights, we’ve created a tool that fills a critical gap in the industry. Slat Vision delivers consistent, practical evaluations of floor health, helps identify safety risks, and supports smarter capital spending decisions. It’s the culmination of over 20 years of work brought to life.
– Tyler Sauck
Vice President
