Virginia-based Truss Tech uses MiTek's SAPPHIRE™ Suite to simplify project management and design.
Custom home with a complex roof? Production-custom building with some tricky details? Wind or hurricane code compliance issues?
Builders in Virginia tri-state area who have these challenges have a great solution: Truss Tech.
“We have a complete mix of jobs,” Truss Tech’s Tom Hill explains. “Single family detached residential homes are our bread and butter, and we excel there because we can bring so much value and optimization to their designs.”
Supercharged by the latest BIM technology, which helps design the structure, optimize the frame, and even drive the precision shop saws, Truss Tech is a floor and roof truss manufacturer that moves over two million board feet of truss stock annually. The Company is a model of efficiency and customer responsiveness, with an enviable reputation for excellence that stretches across three states from their Virginia headquarters. That reputation has translated directly into strong new sales and a mountain of repeat business.
Precision homes call for precision software: Truss Tech is a long-time user of MiTek’s SAPPHIRE™ Suite and MBA, MiTek’s business management program. With the SAPPHIRE Suite, Truss Tech gets house plan as PDFs via email, and SAPPHIRE scans the plans right into its systems. Then, with SAPPHIRE, the designer can quickly create a 3D structure and eliminate design flaws. Truss Tech has earned lots of points for pointing out errors or optimization opportunities…sometimes even for building products they don’t sell. “Our customers are wild for that,” Tom Hill said.
Need to change a truss design at the last sec? That’s easy: Truss Tech uses MiTek's manufacturing management program and Tom Hill can tell what’s happening with any order, at a glance. “SAPPHIRE essentially offers us a dashboard, which enables us to be very responsive, especially when someone calls in with a last-minute change. Whatever a customer wants done, right up until the stock is cut and laid out on the table, we can accommodate them. We are not like other shops that white board the orders.”
3D Modeling? Got that: “With SAPPHIRE, we really wow our home builder customers, with the integrated 3D modeling. We can sit down with a customer and zoom through the framing skeleton in 3D, whereas before we were rolling out 2D paper plan sets on a big table and hunching over them with a pencil. We just got our first salesman on the iPad SAPPHIRE Viewer tool, which holds enormous opportunity for us. To start off, we gave the iPad SAPPHIRE Viewer tool to our salesman with the most custom homes. He can show everyone the load path from the foundation to the roof, and see the load transfers and the entire design. That boosts customer confidence to remarkable levels.”
“The benefits of a design tool like SAPPHIRE are just expansive,” Hill says. By enhancing flexibility and responsiveness, the software has allowed Truss Tech to build on its strong reputation and inspire trust and loyalty among its customers.
Truss Tech is a model of efficiency and customer responsiveness, with an enviable reputation for excellence that stretches across three states from their Virginia headquarters.
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