In the 80’s, we began working with Kerkhoff Associates, an innovative truss manufacturing plant in our area, to build TrusManager, the most extensively integrated and sophisticated office automation and order entry application on the market for wood truss manufacturing businesses. Today, that application is owned and distributed by Truswal Systems, in Arlington, TX, a manufacturer of plates for truss manufacturing, and is in use not only by Kerkhoff Associates, but by several other of the larger, more automated truss manufacturing plants in the US.

In a typical installation, TrusManager allows dozens of office and engineering personnel to simultaneously enter and track complex quotations through the entire order, engineering, production, and invoicing life cycle. It gives in-house sales people the ability to provide as-you-talk-on-the-phone quotations for many designs, and provides a common point of reference for both the office and engineering as more complex quotes are prepared.

Its TrusCalc user interface allows non-engineers to specify even fairly complex truss shapes in the fewest possible keystrokes, filling in all the blanks as soon as the minimal required dimensions have been entered. It then translates TrusManager’s simple representation of a truss shapes into the more complex specifications required by Truswal’s engineering programs, seamlessly automating the process of submitting truss designs to engineering and updating every aspect of the quote or order once engineering has completed a design.

TrusManager’s Hip & Valley Wizards automate the process of specifying all but the most complex hip and valley sets answer a handful of questions and the wizard generates an entire hip or valley set with all dimensions and engineering specifications, ready for submittal to engineering. With a properly-built library of standard pre-designed hip/valley set pieces, many sets can be quoted immediately, and engineered automatically with little need for manual engineer intervention.

Because truss manufacturing is so information-intensive, a typical quote/order database for just a couple years can represent Gigabytes for data for a typical company using TrusManager.

Trilogy continues to help Truswal Systems support and improve TrusManager, and is migrating it from a pure Kman application to one that stores its data in Visual FoxPro (making it accessible from windows tools like Access and Crystal Reports). We have also helped Truswal Systems plan the eventual migration of TrusManager completely out of Kman into a VB client-server environment.

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