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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
September 2019 #11242 Page #8
Celebrating 50 Years of Truss Design Innovation Part XIV: Whole House Launched Joe Kannapell - P.E. Senior VP, MiTek USA www.mitek-us.com
acing nervously outside the truss office, our best software “brain” was physically sick. Another failed demo could end his career. He worried because, after 6 frustrating years, our $50 Million OptiFrame program may not be ready for primetime. And this conservative engineer wasn’t going to lie about its readiness, even at the risk of losing this Home Depot Supply (HDS)* facility.
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Walking into the eerily quiet cavern-like plant for the demo was not reassuring. The tanking Atlanta economy had nearly idled this large location, one of three formerly owned by Williams Brothers. Permits were down 75% in the two years since HDS bought it, and company morale had slumped in tandem. As we greeted the management team, we glimpsed a few rays of hope. Our main adversary, the tenured GM, had been driven out by the new ownership. And we were pleased to find one designer who had used our software, and another one who didn’t know the competitor’s software, working mainly with EWP. Both could help us, but we had to convince the rest of the design staff to disrupt their current practices, in already unsettling times. Home Depot Supply was one of several behemoths upsetting our business. After buying Williams Brothers and prior to our demo, HDS spent another $4 Billion acquiring Cox Lumber and its 6 truss plants, Hughes Supply, Forest Products, and other businesses. And since CEO Robert Nardelli was aggressively driving further acquisitions, the pressure on this demo increased substantially.
*Last month’s article incorrectly identified this company as ProBuild, but it didn’t buy the facility until the following year. Continued next page
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