Making metal roofs competitive

By Emma Peterson. 

The Roofing Passport program was built to increase the use of metal panels in reroofing, a task that requires an efficient and easy bidding process. 

In a new episode of MetalCast™, Karen Edwards spoke to Keith Dietzen of SmartBuild Systems about their role in Sherwin-William's Roofing Passport program. Keith started SmartBuild  seven years ago with the goal of automating the estimation process through a user-friendly bidding platform. While their software was powerful in its own right, it moved into another sphere through a partnership with Sherwin-Williams on their Roofing Passport program. Keith explained, “They determined that the way to facilitate the growth of the metal panel sales was to make it easier for metal roofing contractors to bid re-roof and original roofing jobs using metal panels.” They brought SmartBuild in because of their existing work in automating the bid process, which is an area that sets metal roofers behind traditional asphalt.  

In the asphalt industry, estimates are much simpler. Keith explained, “You give them the number of squares on a roof, and you know what? They're off to the races and they can just throw a number at it and that's good for their bid.” Alternatively, metal roofing must be much more precise in order to factor in elements such as panels and trim pieces. To get an accurate bid, an expert contractor would need to spend time figuring out the materials manually. Sherwin-Williams brought SmartBuild into their Roofing Passport program to automate this.  

They already had the background in this field to support the development of the new program. Keith explained, “We had our own 3D modeling program that could figure out what the cut list links of all those panels have to be, look at the links available on these trim pieces, figure an optimized cut list on that, and then do the same takeoff for accessories.” But that program used existing 3D models fed to it which was something they wanted to automate for the new program. That’s where the partnerships within the Roofing Passport program came in.  

By working with EagleView, an imaging company that delivers 3D data, they were able to build their own 3D models and then run their existing software to estimate the bid, meaning that customers would simply have to give an address and request materials and watch the program build a 3D model and a bid for them. 

Read the interview, Listen to the podcast or Watch the episode to learn more about SmartBuild Systems and how they improve the bidding process.