What if the future of truss design isn’t just about developing better tools, but redefining the entire process from the ground up? On August 15, we publicly announced Paragon — a product that will change the way trusses are designed and built. A product that took years of...

The dream of having a single person model an entire structure was admirable, but developing the software to do that turned into a decade-long struggle. Five years ago, I chronicled the development saga in my series on Fifty Years of Truss Design, Parts XI – XV. As the story told, the...

What was widely expected has finally happened. Years of very profitable high sales led to vast increases in capacity to meet that demand, but now we have declining sales volume—the classic too much supply versus not enough demand to maintain margins. Some like to call this margin...

In the early morning hours of July 19, 2024, there was a major collapse of world commerce. According to the company CrowdStrike, a defect in a content update to its Falcon cybersecurity defense software for Windows caused a world-wide crash that impacted many businesses, most notably the...

The creation of wall panel software is like the creation of all software – experienced insiders do it best. That was true with Gang-Nail’s AutoPan in the 1970s, which Joe Cotton developed while building wall panels for his homebuilding business. It was also the case with Ted...

By 1980, many component manufacturers were anxious to computerize their wall panel work, but they weren’t getting much help. Gang-Nail’s AutoPan was the only available solution, but it had such a steep learning curve that Gang-Nail no longer promoted it. Plus, they were singularly...

Imagine a looming deadline, a complicated 2D, multi-family floor plan. It will take days to get accurate measurements, manually. STITCHER® streamlines the process by capturing walls, openings, and intricate details with precision, transforming a 2D architectural drawing into a 3D model in a...

Today, as an industry, we build faster, cut faster, design faster – thanks to technology and the automation it enables. The offsite construction industry is built on smarter design, more efficient fabrication. Whether in the office or on your plant floor, automation is very much a part of...

The winter months are normally the time to make changes to your processes within your area of influence. Depending on how your company is structured for decision-making, your influence and actions to stay competitive in the face of ever-increasing challenges will determine the long-term...

Applying special load conditions to trusses is a tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming task for designers. Without a visual representation of the load in relation to the trusses on a plan, it can be a challenge to position the loads and determine the load magnitudes required for each truss. As...