New portal for engineered wood

Boise Cascade EWP is among the latest building material manufacturers to launch an online portal to help dealers manage their businesses.

Formally introduced earlier this year, the BC CoNNecr portal grew out of a companywide reevaluation of its service offerings that began about two-and-a-half years ago.

"We had developed a suite of dealer tools over the past seven to l0 years, but each tool was developed to stand alone, for a particular use or for a particular type of customer," said Dan Carter, manager of design & processing systems. "We needed a platform that would pull all the tools together."

Last October, Boise Cascade equipped one of its largest customers with a beta version of the system. Four months later, BC CoNNr,cr was offered to all Boise Cascade EWP customers. Currently, more than two-thirds of them are using or transitioning to the system. "The response has been overwhelming," said Carter.

BC CouNecr provides dealers with instant access to an engineered wood product design and business management platform, combining data, tools, processes and cloudbased applications.

Dealers can run more efficient design departments using its central design platform, integrated wholehouse design, and automatic load distribution to improve speed and accuracy of design and specification. BC CoNNscr mates to next-generation BC Fnnrte,n, enhancing designers' ability to optimize engineered wood products in residential structural design and boost their productivity. It is a single-location repository of information to reduce errors, eliminate re-drawing by different business units, and save resources. With best-in-industry file integration, a change made in one area

Siding And Trim Specifications And Coverage

retail sales as they occur.

Having visibility to the retail sales orders serves as a planning tool for the manufacturer, which is especially important when availability of material is constrained. The partner portal provides the manufacturer with the ability to process orders electronically, thereby reducing costs.

The portal uses the manufacturer's network of distributors, from company owned and operated to public warehouses, and tracks rebates to distributors where material was priced differently from the manufacturer for a particular sales channel. Sales analytics helps stay on top of warranty processing, too.

Distributors

The distributor may be part of the manufacturer's operation, an independent, or a public warehouse. Regardless of the circumstances. the distribu- automatically updates everywhere.

The portal can improve management of projects by knowing the design queue and design resources and applying them efficiently. Projects in queue can be checked and updated quickly, and files and projects can be quickly located with the new project search engine. Building options management is streamlined, so jobs that took hours may only take minutes. Salespeople can log in to prepare materials lists and quotes from remote locations. Project-related documents are managed quickly.

All dealers can now optimize inventoried lengths, batch jobs, and generate usable material with minimum cut waste for most cost-competitive cut packs. BC CoNNecr integrates BC Fneunn design files and optimizes them against inventory on hand for efficient use of inventory. Dealers can optimize job packs whether they do automated processing, pull/ship, or cut with a chainsaw.

Dealers can manage the inventory profile to align with the design queue, workload and staffing, to lower inventory costs and improve turns and profitability. Stocking levels can be managed automatically, generating replenishment orders, emailing purchase orders, and adjusting inventory. Reports go to purchasing, and reconciliation tor enjoys an electronic automated order entry regardless of how the order was entered by other partners.

The portal converts data into many different formats for integration to the partners' business systems, which includes distributing pricing and promotions, managing rebates paid to the distributor by the manufacturer, warranty processing, and sales analytics.

Fabricators/l nstal lers

The biggest benefit to the fabricator/installer is a constant flow of orders from the sales channels he is connected to. This reduces selling time and keeps his funnel full.

The fabricator/installer leverages the relationships built and invested into by the manufacturer to build his business. He will have a closer communication channel opened and can get quicker replies from the manufacturer. distributor. and retailer/dealer.

reports compare actual to perpetual.

Formula-based estimating is quick, easy and accurate, with competitive job pack pricing and optimized cutting and waste virtually eliminated. Access to correct dimensions makes it easier to estimate wall framing, roof systems, and other products to improve productivity of design personnel and increase order size.

A revolutionary cloud-based support center gives dealers their own "My Support" ticket system, provid-

As with all partners on the portal, the fabricator/installer enjoys the analytics of sales and material purchases, plus the inherent ability to track warranty processing.

Time to Think Out of the Box

The way it's been isn't the way it always has to be. Enabling technology like SaaS solutions based on cloud technology pave the way for a new way of doing things in installed sales. Partner portal solutions are out there. The best news is that they solve real business problems for real business users-fast, economically, and with minimal organizational disruption.

- Randall N. Olejnik, is founder and c.e.o. of Cilio Technologies, Brookfield, Wi., creator of the Cilio Partners Portal deployed in the installed sales and special order sales marketplace. Reach him via www .ciliotech.com ing assistance from trained professionals and maintaining a record of help ticket status. A resource library is available 2417 with webinars, selfhelp videos, engineering presentations, product knowledge, marketing tools, and support.

As databases populate, BC CoNr.recr will increasingly provide dealers with up-to-the-minute analytics showing where they're losing time and money-with information accessible even from remote locations.

Tom