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Research by Ian Wyosnick
This study explored customers' workflows when developing material costs and pricing for both project estimates and final invoices. The goal was to understand pain points, needs, and challenges customers face, the tools they use, and their experience using Director's pricing capabilities. We interviewed nine internal and external participants. Findings will guide improvements for the pricing feature in the new Cloud Director and influence other Simpson digital products' pricing tools.
| Finding | Recommendations |
|---|---|
| Pricing workflows are cumbersome for complex projects. | Introduce flexible job grouping and splitting within Director and implement features that automatically roll up prices at project completion. Continue to pursue the vision of Platform which will allow customers to connect and track data across every phase and tool used in the component manufacturing process. |
| Director needs to be flexible enough to handle pricing adjustments that match the way customers run their business. | Prioritize flexibility and customization in Director's pricing workflow by allowing users to price jobs using markup, margin, or board feet. Support setting a target final price that recalculates pricing inputs. Allow customers to "fix" their final price and adjust line item pricing within that constraint. |
| "Pricing Lengths" and "Pick Lengths" features cause confusion due to unclear purpose and overlapping functionality. | Evaluate the Pricing Lengths and Pick Lengths functionalities to provide clearer explanation of what they do, and better differentiate their purposes. Consider consolidating or incorporating these features with related costing functionalities. |
| Keeping cost and pricing data up-to-date requires manual effort and can be prone to errors. | Simplify the UI by offering bulk-update capabilities, fewer screens, and minimizing manual tasks. Automate routine updates. Enhance export capabilities with CSV or Excel options. Introduce API or integrations with popular lumber databases, ERPs, estimating software, and project management tools. |
| Customers want to add notes and rationale to pricing decisions. | Add a "pricing notes" section within the pricing tab of Director, allowing users to log internal-only annotations. Tie notes to the job total, material catalog, or even individual trusses for detailed explanations. |
| Material catalogs are hard to manage at scale. | Introduce catalog versioning and organization tools. Allow users to assign effective dates, tags (e.g., "Forecast," "Q2 Rates," "Discontinued"), and archive or hide old catalogs. |
| Customers want better visibility into the historical material catalogs, costs, and pricing used for projects. | Display the material catalog name and date used in each job. Enable price history tracking and trend visualization in Director. Allow users to compare catalog versions over time. |
| Name | Role | Org | Session Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eric Ludemann | Senior Building Tech Implementation & Support Specialist | Simpson Strong-Tie | March 25, 2025 |
| Chad Roop | Sales Engineer | Simpson Strong-Tie | March 27, 2025 |
| Derrick Elliott | Technical Customer Support Specialist | Simpson Strong-Tie | March 27, 2025 |
| Steve Wangen | Building Software Support Technician | Simpson Strong-Tie | March 27, 2025 |
| Rick Hightower | Territory Sales Representative | Simpson Strong-Tie | March 28, 2025 |
| Daniel Smith | Truss Designer | Stark Truss | April 3, 2025 |
| Todd Mauk | Project Manager, Building Technology | Simpson Strong-Tie | April 7, 2025 |
| Matt Lowdermilk | Commercial Multifamily Operations Manager | Stark Truss | April 8, 2025 |
| Scott Stewart | Truss Design Technician | Stark Truss | April 10, 2025 |
| Research Question | Answer & Supporting Finding |
|---|---|
| What pain points do customers experience using pricing features in Director? | Customers find complex project pricing workflows cumbersome, struggle with rigid pricing models that force them to only use markup (for example), and experience confusion around key features like Pricing Lengths and Pick Lengths. |
| How do current pricing processes align with or conflict with customer workflows? | Director often conflicts with customer workflows by not supporting pricing based on board feet or margins and lacking flexibility to handle real-world business needs. |
| What needs do customers have related to pricing information accuracy, updates, and notifications? | Customers need clarity in pricing outputs, the ability to set and hold final prices, and better visibility into pricing history and validity. |
| How do customers currently manage and update pricing data, and what challenges exist? | Customers rely on manual processes to manage pricing data, which are error-prone and inefficient, particularly when updating material catalogs or syncing with external tools. |
| Are there specific pricing features that confuse or frustrate customers? Why? | Pricing Lengths and Pick Lengths are widely misunderstood due to unclear differentiation and overlapping functionality, requiring excessive setup and support. |
| What enhancements or changes would most significantly improve the Director pricing experience? | Enhancements should include flexible pricing input (markup, margin, board feet), ability to lock final prices, catalog management tools, automation for updates, and clearer pricing display. |
Customers may split up large or complex jobs into multiple Director projects, based on different buildings plans, elevations, sections, phases, materials, et al. and track these separately. The resulting pain point for customers is managing pricing through these splits and subsequently re-combining pricing information into final quotes or invoices.
To get around this, Stark Truss' Commercial Multifamily unit has their own proprietary Excel file to manage pricing that they have been using for quite some time. It splits up and prices jobs based on the component (wall, floor, roof, etc.) and creates a final invoice.
Stark's primary complaint with their process, however, is that by using Excel, it is no longer tied into the rest of their dataset (e.g. Truss Design Studio) and they are unable to create historical trends or forward projections based on these quotes.
"Going back to the pricing [Excel] sheet, I can start to put together this project isolating it by roof, by floors, by wall panels, and I can price each independently. We put in whatever we want our margin to be and I get price for each. At the end of the day, what our customer gets to see, I print this to PDF. They see each building, the roof price, the floor price, the hardware, the wall panels. It's all gonna be priced out here with our notes. It's just trying to get everything brought together on these larger scale projects." – Matt Lowdermilk, CMF Operations Manager, Stark Truss
"They might break it down by floor. They might break it down by unit with a vertical stack. And if in that case, they would then have to be able to come up with pricing for the whole structure by linking all of those projects together."
- Rick Hightower, Territory Sales Representative, SST
Customers want to price using markup, margin, or dollars-per-board-foot, but Director only supports adjusting markup, leading to customers not utilizing pricing in Director and turning to external spreadsheets or other tools.
"I think that changing some of the flexibility would be ideal and would probably have us using Director for pricing instead of Excel. It would be nice if your default was that markups and margins and dollar per board foot were all interchangeable. That I choose which one to change."
- Daniel Smith, Truss Designer, Stark Truss
"The thing about it is our program doesn't do margins today. Customers that are using Director today are just doing markup. But…sit in on a on an earnings call. They don't talk about markup, they talk about net margin. That's how businesses operate."
- Chad Roop, Sales Engineer, SST
Four interviewees articulated a need for reverse-calculation pricing workflows where customers can set the total price or margin target, and have the system automatically recalculate component-level pricing to match.
"They want a round number [for the final price] or they want a price that they sold this job to, and they need that to reflect back to the individual truss prices."
- Todd Mauk, Project Manager - Building Technology, SST
"They just want to price this at $96,000... or they want to price it at 95,800 and no change. And that's what they would prefer to do. There's no good way to do that today."
- Chad Roop, Sales Engineer, SST
Director provides a basic labor factor that applies uniformly across a project, but this lacks the flexibility needed to accommodate variations in job complexity.
Recommendations:
Quotes:
"That's where the labor factor is a little harder to determine… where it might take you an hour to build 5 common trusses, it might take you an hour to build one or two of those big cut-up trusses."
- Derrick Elliott, Technical Customer Support Specialist, SST
"For every thousand board foot it's $50. A lot of small operations do that just to avoid the confusion."
- Steve Wangen, Software Support Technician, SST
Customers are confused by the Pricing Lengths and Pick Lengths functionalities. Simpson's implementation team frequently has to set this up for customers who are unclear when or why to use these.
"[Pricing and pick lengths] trips people up a little bit. Once I explain it, I think they more or less get it, but I also don't know how much they really take what they learn and come back and optimize things. They're sort of like, well, that Simpson guy set it up and I'm not touching it now.' Which is unfortunate. They don't feel they have the power to easily make changes."
- Eric Ludemann, Implementation and Customer Support, SST
"It is it is kind of confusing, until somebody can actually wrap their head around it when we have the pick lengths and pricing lengths and how that works."
- Todd Mauk, Project Manager, Building Technology, SST
Customers need to use manual processes to input and adjust cost and pricing data that require considerable time and introduces data errors.
"[I'd like] some way to import pricing from an outside source. That's the biggest pain point. Just physically going in and typing all those numbers in and worrying about fat fingering and getting the wrong price in there."
- Steve Wangen, Software Support Technician, SST
"So if this is new lumber pricing, that's gonna affect all future projects I create. I don't wanna go in here and change project materials because I'm gonna have to do it again on the next project."
- Eric Ludemann, Implementation and Customer Support
When pricing is adjusted due to scope changes, internal errors, special customer requests, or margin decisions, users want a way to document what happened and why.
"It would be nice to to have noting in the pricing tab so [customers] can make sales notes. [They] could put in here, 'we missed x, so we're holding the price. Margins will be affected.' Something like that. So these notes then are searchable..."
- Steve Wangen, Software Support Technician, SST
Customers duplicate material catalogs to simulate price changes, manage forecasts, or apply different pricing scenarios across jobs. Over time, this can result in dozens or even hundreds of catalogs.
"We ended up with a lot of material catalogs. We would have multiple months of back history [and] that list quickly got pretty big."
- Steve Wangen, Software Support Technician, SST
"If all I ever do is have one material catalog and every few weeks I'm going in here and I'm changing my lumber pricing, I think sometimes it's harder to keep track of where that pricing came from on this job."
- Eric Ludemann, Implementation and Customer Support
Director takes a snapshot of the active material catalog when a job is created, but users have no way to trace that catalog afterward.
"There's nothing that tells you that… unless you go dig out a material cost by plan and do it longhand. It would be pretty neat if there was a way to somehow do some forecasting…"
- Derrick Elliott, Technical Customer Support Specialist, SST
"If we could get to that point that it could provide a user-friendly pricing, then with it being within the software, it could spit out more tables and data and everything to really show historical data." – Matt Lowdermilk, CMF Operations Manager, Stark Truss