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Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$$er
January 2026 #18318 Page #84
Why the Future of the Truss Industry Belongs to Teams With Visibility By Kenneth Sewell
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very truss manufacturer knows this moment. A job should be moving forward, but it isn’t. Sales thinks design has it. Design is waiting on information. Production is asking for answers. Someone opens a file only to realize it is outdated. Nobody feels negligent, yet nothing is moving. For years, this friction was tolerated. Today, it is a competitive liability. The truss industry is entering a new reality. Builders expect faster answers. Timelines are tighter. Teams are leaner. Visibility is no longer a nice-to-have. It is becoming the difference between winning work and watching it go elsewhere.
The Visibility Gap Holding Teams Back Most manufacturers do not struggle because their people are slow or unskilled. They struggle because their processes are invisible. Spreadsheets, inboxes, and shared drives were never designed to run a modern bid-to-build operation. They store information, but they do not show flow or ownership. The result is a visibility gap that quietly slows teams down.
Where Delays Really Begin Late bids and rework rarely start in design. They start earlier, during intake and estimating. In many shops, that stage still looks like this: •
Handoffs buried in long email threads
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Updated plans saved in shared folders no one consistently checks
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Estimates paused while someone searches for missing information
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Designers unknowingly working from outdated files
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Multiple versions of the same job circulating at the same time.
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