Materials Catalog Research Report
March 2025 | UX Researcher: Ian Wyosnick
Table of Contents
- Executive Summary
- Detailed Findings
- Pain Points for Internal Teams
- Customer Pain Points
- Recommendations, Benefits, and Opportunities
Executive Summary
Background
Multiple Simpson Strong-Tie digital tools utilize a "material catalog" feature that allows customers to pick the materials that they have in their inventory or are needed for a specific construction or manufacturing project. 30-minute interviews were conducted with teams and sales staff to understand the way material catalogs and product databases are maintained and used by Simpson digital tools, and to uncover the needs and pain points customers have when using material catalogs. This information will be used to inform requirements for a shared material catalog data architecture and customer experience.
Definitions
- Product Database: The complete list of products stored in Simpson internal databases. This includes connectors, hangers, lumber, third-party products, etc.
- Material Catalog: The customer facing experience, where customers create a subset list of materials from the larger product database.
Findings
Findings reveal challenges in data integration, technical debt, workflow inefficiencies, fragmented user experiences, and the need for better system integrations.
Pain Points for Internal Teams
- Material information is stored in fragmented data sources - Product teams illustrated how data is scattered across multiple databases and legacy systems. This approach hampers efficiency and makes it challenging to maintain accurate, up-to-date product information.
- Manual effort is required to maintain product information - Product databases and material catalogs are maintained in Simpson digital tools with processes involving manual data entry and updates from multiple teams and sources.
- There are hurdles of technical debt, buy-in, information silos, and budget impeding the unification of product databases and material catalog experiences - Teams spoke of past and ongoing efforts to improve and unify product databases and the material catalog experience along with the roadblocks they experienced along the way.
Customer Pain Points
- Customers face a complex user experience that requires manual effort to create and maintain up-to-date material catalogs - Customer issues stem from the need to perform unnecessary steps or interact with multiple systems to complete tasks, leading to inefficiency and frustration.
- It is challenging for customers to manage and track inventory, material costs, and pricing - Customers have difficulty knowing if prices are up-to-date or when they were last updated, leading to uncertainty when revisiting old bids.
- There is a lack of integration with other systems and product databases customers use in their workflows - Customers manage and maintain of materials separate from their ERPs and point of sale (POS) systems, leading to duplicative effort and time costs.
Recommendations, Benefits, and Opportunities
Creating a shared service for product databases and creating a unified material catalog experience for customers has clear benefits for Simpson product teams and customers. Platform has an opportunity to be the agent of change and lead the charge to implement a unified product database and material catalog experience.
Recommendation
- Partner with Spec Tools on existing initiatives to unify the Simpson product database - Marty Downs and Russ Anderson have already done a large amount of work to develop a unified product database in Aras, and they are gearing up to deploy Aras globally to manage all engineering product information across the organization.
Benefits of a unified product database and material catalog experience
- Reducing the time and effort spent by internal staff and customers maintaining product databases and material catalogs
- Simplification of the overall customer experience
Opportunities
- Solve a primary customer pain point by shortening the time needed to go from takeoff to estimate - Across research projects, teams and customers have spoken about the costs associated with creating quotes and estimates, that may or may not end up in work. By addressing this pain point Simpson can become an innovator and "industry leader".
- Deeper integrations between Simpson tools and with external systems can provide benefits for customers and outside product suppliers
Detailed Findings
Pain Points for Internal Teams
Material information is stored in fragmented data sources
Product teams illustrated how data is scattered across multiple databases and legacy systems. This approach hampers efficiency and makes it challenging to maintain accurate, up-to-date product information.
- Director: Uses an Access database (referred to as PST, PS2, or ProdCell) used as a centralized repository for managing design materials that have engineering values. This system is undergoing a transition to a cloud-based version called the Material Vault.
- Truss Studio / Layout / Cornerstone: Database is the same as Director. Material information is sourced from the PS2 database (ProdCell). This database is being migrated to Azure to create the Material Vault for cloud usage.
- iStruct/CSD: Maintains a master database where materials are managed through a web portal called the product data center. This portal contains characteristic values and design properties.
- Pipeline: Primarily stored in the point of sale (POS) system of the lumberyard or component plant. LBMs manually enter product info, including SKU and description combinations, into their POS systems.
- OLS: West Pier Studios (WP) is the current developer building the software and managing the rules engines for OLS tools. Simpson provides materials to be used in OLS apps to WP, and WP is responsible for creating 3D models and textures for the materials displayed in the application.
- Spec Tools: Material information is stored in a legacy system using Access databases and Excel files managed by regional experts (USA and Canada).
- Customer Portal: The source of data is "usually Excel files" that are integrated into the data flow, which includes a mix of information from various sources (SAP, Hybris, Salsify).
Manual effort is required to maintain product information
Product databases and material catalogs are maintained in Simpson digital tools with processes involving manual data entry and updates from multiple teams and sources.
- OLS: Product measurements and layouts are provided by Simpson structural engineers to West Pier, who manually remodels products because there isn't a way to directly import existing models and apply textures.
- iStruct/EWP: Maintaining product lists that can be turned into customer material catalogs requires Simpson engineers to keep track of products through external catalogs and manually updating data.
- Director: The PST (soon to be Material Vault) is read only to customers. Internally, the data is manually populated with data published by various entities.
- Spec Tools: "Engineering manages this data one hundred percent themselves. They provide us with database updates as needed."
- Customer Portal: "Without an upstream database feeding others, it's like all these separate data gathering operations and it shouldn't be."
There are hurdles of technical debt, buy-in, information silos, and budget impeding the unification of product databases and material catalog experiences
Teams spoke of past and ongoing efforts to improve and unify product databases and the material catalog experience along with the roadblocks they experienced along the way.
- Customer Portal: "This whole issue was supposed to have originally been part of this year's plan, but because of budget constraints, it got moved to next year."
- Spec Tools: "I mean, it is always comes up. Can you service this data is like, yeah. But you're gonna have to consume it the way we give it to you. We can't just replicate exactly what you have. So what you'll run into with all these material databases and all this stuff is just the technical depth to make the conversion."
- Spec Tools: "We originally put tons and tons and tons of data into Aras and the idea that people, if you build it, they will come. And nobody came."
Customer Pain Points
Customers face a complex user experience that requires manual effort to create and maintain up-to-date material catalogs
Customer issues stem from the need to perform unnecessary steps or interact with multiple systems to complete tasks, leading to inefficiency and frustration.
- Pipeline: "Under my understanding, [entering product information] is manual. It's not like they're going to Simpson's catalog and importing our materials with our attributes and engineering values into their point of sale system."
- Chad Roop: "I have to go to all these different pages just to work with my material catalog, and it's aggravating. If I could just make my changes from one page would be so much easier."
It is challenging for customers to manage and track inventory, material costs, and pricing
Customers have difficulty knowing if prices are up-to-date or when they were last updated, leading to uncertainty when revisiting old bids.
- Jason Padilla: "[Customers will] bid a lot of jobs today with a material catalog, but they don't want to have a material catalog for every week. What happens is they design a job, but they have to go back and reprice it one month later, two months later, six months later. When they pull up a job, they don't know which time frame the lumber was priced at."
- Pipeline: "Having that connection to when we go to a job and we go to our bill of material...we have the products and the quantities, but what we don't have is the price because that is in the point of sales system."
- Chad Roop: "But now if I'm like, oh, man. I needed eights and fourteens and twenties... So I have to come back here, and I'd have to add a new pricing length of eights, fourteens, twenties... and now I have to come back to selection."
- Director: "[Stark is] basically creating a profile for every permutation of a pricing length so that they can turn off a certain species…"
There is a lack of integration with other systems and product databases customers use in their workflows
Customers manage and maintain of materials separate from their ERPs and point of sale (POS) systems, leading to duplicative effort and time costs.
- Director: "From customer perspective, they really want to integrate more databases, right, and more products."
- Chad Roop: "Why don't we just link [Director's material catalog] to the customer's customer portal? Just pull the information from the customer portal and populate my cost in here."
- OLS: "I think [having] current products and the latest, greatest available [in OLS] is going to make this tool be the one that homeowners go to first."
- iStruct/EWP: "So what they wanna do is every morning come in fresh and just say, you know what? I have unlimited pieces of my stock links. Let me do my cutting based on that. The downside of iOptimize is they're maintaining their inventory in here and in their ERP, in their point of sale system. So they're having to do duplicate duplicate efforts."
- Pipeline: "If [customers] could just hit a button that says sync once they connect to their point of sale, that can pull in their SKUs..."
Recommendations, Benefits, and Opportunities
Unifying the Simpson product database into a Platform shared service can reduce maintenance efforts by internal teams and improve customer satisfaction by providing accurate, up-to-date product information that is easy to maintain.
Recommendation: Partner with Spec Tools on existing initiatives to unify the Simpson product database
Marty Downs and Russ Anderson have already done a large amount of work to develop a unified product database in Aras, and they are gearing up to deploy Aras globally to manage all engineering product information across the organization. There is an opportunity to use what they have already done and expand to other Digital Solutions teams.
- Spec Tools: "We spent six months with data scientists baking out this model with the idea that we could model any product Simpson Strong Tie manufacturers, buys, or sells, and we have yet to come across one we can't model."
- Spec Tools: "We're gonna redeploy it globally to manage all engineering product information through all of Simpson Strong Tie."
- Customer Portal: "The future, as I understand it and as I think it should be, is when we move to developing a full PLM system [where] Aras would have a lot of the data around the products that can flow to SAP and to Hybris."
Benefit: Reducing the time and effort spent by internal staff and customers maintaining product databases and material catalogs
Teams were unable to provide exact metrics on how much time is spent manually updating product information, or how much effort it takes to make sure information is current. However, research clearly indicates that Simpson's engineers, developers, and product managers would benefit from an integrated database that:
- reduces the time it takes Simpson's internal engineering teams to push product data and specifications.
- allows Simpson's digital product teams to immediately update material information in their tools with little to no effort.
- allows outside partners to more easily integrate their product lines.
- minimizes the time it takes customers to update their catalogs and systems.
Benefit: Simplification of the overall customer experience
Currently, maintaining materials and products in Simpson tools involves complicated, manual steps and processes, contributing to user experiences that are hard to learn and cumbersome to use.
- Pipeline: "The reduction of onboarding and maintenance is [a benefit] rather than manually going through that [process]. [Instead] you could just sync up your SKU list with our master list [so customers could] get up and running more quickly."
- Truss Studio / Layout / Cornerstone: "The ability to be able to access and change, material catalogs on [something] as minute as a member would be beneficial for us. That would put us in the same, realm as what our competitors do."
Opportunity: Solve a primary customer pain point by shortening the time needed to go from takeoff to estimate
Across research projects (including this one), teams and customers have spoken about the costs associated with creating quotes and estimates, that may or may not end up in work. By addressing this pain point Simpson can become an innovator and "industry leader".
- Pipeline: "If we had an integration and can peek in and display price based on SKU, that would actually allow us to show a full estimate in our software rather than just showing a bill of material that then needs to get sent to a point of sale and get pricing applied there, to create an estimate."
- LotSpec: "We gotta bring it together. We have these on prem parts and pieces, and we have all this magic happening in the cloud. But the closer we can bring [design and estimation] together, that's what customers are looking for."
- LotSpec: "How freaking cool would it be if as the designer's drawing and placing components, [they're] getting a real time estimate of how much the design is going to cost. Think of all the architects, [saying], 'I have to make some budget. This homeowner doesn't wanna spend more than $300,000.' So the architect starts drawing they're seeing a real time dollar value based off of pipeline estimating. That would be a first in the industry."
Opportunity: Deeper integrations between Simpson tools and with external systems can provide benefits for customers and outside product suppliers
Integrations that enable third-party suppliers to directly update product data ensures that customers have access to the latest materials. Additionally, integrations with POS and ERP systems can streamline data management, ensure consistency, and enhance the overall customer experience by automating updates and reducing duplicate efforts.
- Pipeline: "But then the other big thing is if a large pro dealer that has lumberyard and component manufacturing capabilities. If they want to do an estimate that happens before the component side, but then also pick up that same estimate and continue on to the truss side, and it's connected to the same point of sales system, that's going to really help grow sales."
- Pipeline: "If these things all work together, and I was at least with Simpson stuff, and I could pass along the same product list from estimating into components into whatever else, that's gonna be a big part of bringing those solutions together for those large pro dealer customers so they have a a more seamless, more seamless experience as one customer."
- OLS: "[Ideally] Trex or whoever is responsible for their materials and other products, can log in to an account with us. And they can say, 'We are discontinuing this product. We are adding this product'."
- Customer Portal: "It feels like once we get all the systems essentially, like, using or working with the same data, that stuff is really like that next piece of, like, frequently bought together or, you know, these things can be packaged or substituted."