A
Th e
Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
June 2019 #11239 Page #8
Celebrating 50 Years of Truss Design Innovation Joe Kannapell - P.E. Senior VP, MiTek USA www.mitek-us.com
Part XI: A Whole House in the New Millennium
W
e truss designers were outfoxed by an unlikely pair of moguls who knew nothing about truss design. Gene Toombs and Tom Denig, CEOs of MiTek and TrusJoist, without our prompting, announced in 2001 that their companies would join forces to design the “whole house.” Since we designers fashioned ourselves as problem solvers, we feared that they were tackling a nonexistent problem. Their grand vision sounded a lot like sales hype, and we had no choice but to go along with it. But we wondered how this grand scheme would delay all of the basic programming projects that our CMs needed. Our fear intensified as we sent two dozen of our best programmers 900 miles away to work on this “OptiFrame” project. Toombs and Denig figured it would take two years to bolt together our Eframe and TJ Expert programs. Knowing how many unfinished projects these programmers left behind, especially relating to wall panels, we prayed that our competitors would be held at bay. Enter a most unlikely disrupter who barged onto the scene: an unkempt, self-taught, wall panel guy who hailed from a small plant in rural Marks, Mississippi (population 1500 and declining). From that humble background, Tommy Wood had made himself into the foremost wall panel expert in the industry. Somehow Tommy had outfoxed us by peddling a concept he called “parametric” design. This techy “handle” intimidated us who were competitors, and created a rallying cry for hundreds of loyal users. When he teamed up with TrusWal and they jointly launched a competing “IntelliBuild” platform, we had reason to be concerned.
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