What actually costs you money
Rework on incoming orders
Someone in your office re-checks quantities, catches the missing header, calls the dealer back about the lean-to. That's labor on every order, and it scales with volume rather than going away.
Shorts and returns
A takeoff that was close but not right becomes a second delivery run, or material coming back. Both cost more than the margin on the line item that was wrong.
Quote turnaround
The dealer who can hand a customer a number on the first visit closes more. If your dealers wait on you to quote, that delay is yours too.
Dealers who don't have tools
A dealer with no way to show a customer the building competes on price alone. That's a race to the bottom you end up funding.
The shift worth aiming at: instead of receiving orders and validating them, you receive designs that were correct when they were created — because the same model that showed the customer the building produced the material list.
What to look for
Consistent takeoff format across every dealer
One component structure, every time, regardless of who designed it. That's what makes orders processable without a human reading them first.
Your product line, your pricing
Your inventory, your part numbers, your costs — not a generic catalog. Dealers price from your data, so what they quote is what you'd charge.
Real framing, not a picture
A takeoff is only as good as the model behind it. If the software renders an exterior and prices from square footage, you'll still be checking every order. The difference between a shell and a model.
Something dealers will actually use
Tools that require training don't get adopted. If a dealer can't design a building in the first hour, it won't get used on a sales call, and the whole benefit disappears.
A configurator dealers can put on their own sites
Your dealers want leads. An embeddable designer on their site turns visitors into complete designs, and those designs flow back as orders in your format. It makes your dealers more effective, which makes your product line more attractive to carry. How an embed changes lead flow.
Coverage across what you sell
If you supply post frame and red iron, one tool for both means one takeoff format and one set of pricing to maintain. Why coverage matters.
The pricing model question
Per-seat pricing is a problem for a supplier. If every dealer, salesperson and estimator is a paid seat, the cost of putting the tool in front of your whole network grows with the network — which discourages exactly the adoption you want.
Flat pricing per company means you can put it in everyone's hands without the cost being the reason not to.
Questions worth asking
- How does the cost change as we add dealers or users?
- Can we load our own inventory, part numbers and pricing?
- Does the takeoff come out in the same structure every time?
- Can dealers embed the configurator on their own sites?
- How long before a new dealer is designing buildings?
- What happens when we add a product to the line?
- Does it cover every framing system we supply?
Where Redline sits
Redline 3D models framing member by member across post frame, red iron and stick frame, with multi-level interior framing, and produces member-level takeoffs with sizes and lengths in a consistent structure. Pricing comes from your own cost data, which you control.
Flat pricing for your whole team, $0 setup, and a website configurator your dealers can run on their own sites under their own branding.