Do You Actually Know What It Costs to Cut Truss Components?

Programmed Timber at the 2026 FTMA Conference & Trade Expo, discussing production economics with Frame & Truss manufacturers

Do You Actually Know What It Costs to Cut Truss Components?

That’s where margin is actually lost, and it’s the question Programmed Timber put to the industry at the 2026 FTMA Conference & Trade Expo.

Throughout the recent FTMA Conference & Trade Expo, one message kept surfacing across conversations on the floor: the pressure facing Frame & Truss businesses is no longer confined to a single part of the operation. Labour shortages, rising processing costs, tighter margins, material efficiency challenges and more volatile demand are combining in ways that are harder to offset than they once were. In stronger markets, higher volumes can absorb these pressures. In softer conditions, they become the difference between a healthy operation and one that is quietly bleeding margin.

For Programmed Timber, conversations at the conference consistently returned to the same question: not what timber costs, but what it actually costs to process it. The production economics model presented by Programmed Timber at the event was built around a deceptively simple challenge to every fabricator in the room:

“Do you really know what your saw is costing you every hour it runs, or just what the timber costs?”

For most operations, the honest answer is the latter. Timber input cost is tracked closely. The full cost of cutting, operator labour, equipment amortisation, waste disposal, and waste percentage is rarely brought together in a single number. And that gap between what businesses think processing costs are and what the actual cost is, in many cases, where margin is genuinely being lost.

What the Model Actually Measured

Rather than focusing purely on product cost, the Programmed Timber production economics model explored the broader operational impact of internal processing, specifically what it truly costs to run a saw for every hour it operates. The model brought together variables that fabricators rarely view as a single cost equation: operator cost, equipment amortisation, waste disposal, timber input cost, production advantage and waste percentage.

One of the more pointed observations from the presentation was about material specification. A recurring question throughout the event was whether high-grade structural timber is routinely being used for low-demand components, webs, short chords and other parts that may not require the same level of material specification. In many cases, businesses acknowledged that existing habits had simply continued because that was how the operation had always functioned, not because it still made the best commercial sense.

In one modelled scenario, a change to this approach (same saw output, same shift hours) generated a daily cost advantage of $3,117 and an annualised advantage of $748,171. Across a 15-year saw life, the cumulative difference modelled at over $11.2 million from a single saw. The shift wasn’t about cutting more. It was about making more.

The Operational Question This Raises

At a broader level, the model was intended to prompt a more fundamental question across the industry: what work still genuinely needs to happen inside the plant, and what work is now creating unnecessary cost, congestion or labour absorption before fabrications even begins?

Internal cutting, sizing, sorting, handling and rework all consume time, labour and floor space before a component reaches the jig. These steps have long been a standard part of many operations. But as labour becomes harder to source, material costs rise and throughput matters more, the commercial logic behind each of those steps deserves closer scrutiny.

Modern detailing software, timber processing techniques and manufacturing systems now provide far greater flexibility in how components can be specified, sourced and integrated into production flow. The question is whether businesses are actively using that flexibility to simplify their operations, or whether internal processes are continuing by habit rather than by design.

What the Strongest Operations Have in Common

The broader takeaway from the conference was consistent. Businesses achieving the strongest operational results are often not the ones adding more capacity or more complexity. Increasingly, they are the ones removing it, simplifying flow, reducing variability and allowing skilled labour to focus on production rather than preparation.

For many fabricators, the challenge is no longer simply finding more volume. It is improving the economics of the volume already moving through the operation. Same hours. Different business.

Operational efficiency is no longer just about working faster. It is about understanding where labour, processing and material cost are accumulating throughout the operation, and whether those processes still make commercial sense.

Because in the current market, the biggest threat to margin may not be what businesses are buying. It may be the cost of what they are still doing internally, without fully understanding how much it is actually absorbing.

The Industry Can No Longer Afford to Stand Still

The Frame & Truss industry is facing a pivotal moment. Cost pressures are not easing, and the businesses that continue operating as they always have, running the same processes, absorbing the same inefficiencies and expecting a different result, will find the margin available to them continuing to shrink. As Einstein observed, doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting a different outcome is the definition of a problem that never resolves itself.

The conversation the industry needs to be having is not simply about automation. It is about sequence. The principle of ‘optimise before you automate’ has never been more relevant, but the real opportunity goes a step further. If a business can reduce the very processes it was considering automating and replace them with a networked, integrated supply model, it does not just automate better. It operates fundamentally differently.

That is the shift the production economics model is designed to surface. The question is not simply whether automation is the right answer, but whether the processes feeding into it are optimised to support it. Automation alone does not fix underlying inefficiencies and that is where supplemented material comes in. By integrating pre-cut, pre-specified timber supply into the production flow, fabricators can remove the internal processing steps that were never adding value and allow their automation to do what it was actually designed to do.

Programmed Timber built this model specifically to support industry fabricators through that process, to bring visibility to the numbers that often go unmeasured and to start a conversation about what a leaner, better-networked operation could look like in practice.

Watch the webinar with Programmed Timber, showcasing their cost model

Want to run this model against your own numbers?

Get in touch with Programmed Timber to find out where your operation has room to move.
Phone: +61 2 9623 7866 | Email: sales@ptimbers.com.au | Website: www.ptimbers.com.au