Imagine, if you will, two different component manufacturers (CMs) owned by the same parent company bidding against each other on the same project. Each location wants the order. As they compete on price, they drive down their own company’s revenue and gross margin. One location may win the job, but the parent company receives less for the work.
This is very real and happens every day. At Todd Drummond Consulting (TDC), I know of multiple instances within large lumber and building material (LBM) companies where their own CM locations compete for the same projects. Based on TDC’s experience, the accumulated revenue lost through this internal competition runs into millions of dollars.
How much easier would this be to manage if authorized employees across locations could view the same project on one platform? A shared project record would help teams identify overlapping bids, coordinate responsibility, and review pricing before quotes are sent. What would preventing even a portion of that needless revenue loss be worth to your company?
My first two articles in this “Freedom to Choose Any Plate Vendor” series explained how the Truss WorkMinute Estimator (TWE) will support plate-vendor choice and add automated work minutes. For companies with multiple locations, TWE and AppWright will also support consistent management as the business grows, merges operations, and evaluates supplier relationships.
Integrate Acquired CMs With Less Disruption
As companies grow through acquisitions and mergers, newly acquired CMs often face pressure to adopt the parent company’s plate vendor. Fragmented information can drive that push: leadership wants consistent bids, schedules, and reports, and a single vendor may appear to be the easiest way to get them.
TWE and AppWright will allow the company to unify management information without requiring every CM to use the same plate vendor. AppWright already supports bidding, scheduling, customer records, and daily management across locations. TWE is being developed to extend that environment across all five major plate-vendor environments.
TWE is a browser-based application that imports and stores critical truss data and calculates work minutes. The combined AppWright/TWE management environment can be highly customized to the parent company’s bidding, approval, scheduling, and reporting practices.
An acquired CM can then be integrated through those shared management practices while retaining its existing plate vendor, design software, and engineering practices. This removes the need to change vendors simply to bring information together and avoids the added disruption of an engineering-system conversion. It also reduces unnecessary pressure on the acquired team while helping leadership manage the larger company consistently.
Strengthen Your Position in Plate Vendor Negotiations
That continuity strengthens management’s hand in plate-vendor negotiations. When changing suppliers also means rebuilding daily business processes, the disruption limits practical alternatives. Keeping those processes in place gives leadership greater freedom to evaluate plate pricing, engineering support, responsiveness, and overall value. Engineering transitions still require planning, but fewer business functions need to be tied to that decision.
A company can keep a strong supplier relationship at one location while considering a better fit elsewhere. Good vendors deserve honest dealing and fair treatment. Practical alternatives allow management to negotiate with confidence while maintaining relationships that earn the company’s business.
Keep Your KPIs and Add Work Minutes
Board feet, piece count, square footage, sales dollars, gross-margin dollars, and other familiar KPIs remain useful. TWE will bring those measurements into live reports and allow management to compare them with automated work minutes. Leaders gain a clearer view of how each order uses available capacity.
With straightforward equipment and material selections, TWE will calculate expected work minutes for the configured production methods. Setup, cutting, assembly, handling, lumber sizes, and quantities affect the result. Despite different plants having different capabilities, the company gets a consistent calculation structure.
Two orders with similar board footage can require very different amounts of work. Likewise, the same work may require different labor at plants with different equipment. Work minutes make those differences visible before management commits capacity. They represent expected labor effort; converting that effort into a schedule still requires consideration of crews, equipment availability, and bottlenecks.
Share Capacity and Resources Across Locations
With AppWright/TWE, management will be able to view capacity schedules across locations and move projects between them with just a few mouse clicks. This shared view helps leaders distribute work according to available labor, equipment, and production capacity, making better use of the company’s resources while protecting delivery commitments.
Shared project records will keep the receiving location, sales team, and corporate management working from the same information. Schedules, responsibilities, and project communications can stay together, making handoffs easier to manage. Leadership gains clearer oversight, and employees spend less time making phone calls, sending separate updates, or searching for the latest project status.
Prepare for the December Release Goal
Our target for the initial TWE production release is December 1, 2026. Companies can prepare by identifying the reports leadership needs across locations, the equipment and materials used at each plant, and where employees currently reenter or reconcile information. The company’s data remains its own, with access managed according to employee responsibilities.
Supplier choice also carries responsibility. TWE does not authorize using one vendor’s engineering software with another vendor’s plates. Each location must honor its agreements and applicable engineering requirements; any such combination requires the engineering software provider’s express written permission.
Which decision is hardest to make consistently across your locations: pricing, scheduling, or allocating capacity? Send me a brief note with your number of locations and that challenge. We can start there and discuss where TWE and AppWright could help.
Todd Drummond Consulting helps manufacturers identify what is limiting performance, whether it begins with workflow, labor visibility, capacity planning, training, scheduling, handoffs, or leadership decisions. With nearly 40 years of manufacturing experience and almost 25 years as a full-time consultant, I provide practical guidance that helps leaders simplify work, improve flow, reduce waste, protect margins, and move forward with confidence. Review my client testimonials to see what other manufacturers have said about working with Todd Drummond Consulting.
todd@todd-drummond.com | www.todd-drummond.com | 603-748-1051