Engineering is the most expensive backlog in your building

Ask a millwork owner where the company loses money and most will point at constraints they see on the floor. The machine that went down. The crew that ran long on install. The panel that came back wrong three days before delivery.

 

Then look at the numbers. AWI Cost of Doing Business Survey data puts the engineering productivity multiplier at roughly $15.35 of downstream shop labor and materials output for every $1 of drafting and engineering corporate cost. Engineering is the highest-return dollar in the building, which makes a backlog in engineering the most expensive delay you have.

 

Nine out of ten shops named the same constraint

 

In August 2026 we surveyed 124 woodworking shops across the United States, Canada, and Australia and New Zealand about their current CAD/CAM tools. 85% named the time it takes to detail or engineer a job as a pain point. It was the number one answer in every region, and nothing else came close.

 

The pressure is building from both sides. With increased renovation and retrofit rather than new construction, and existing buildings do not cooperate: nothing is square, dimensions have to be field-verified, and phasing around an occupied space means more one-off pieces and fewer repeatable runs. Same contract value, more drawings. Meanwhile a shortage of skilled engineers pulls design windows in. More drawings, less time, in the exact place where speed decides profitability.

 

What the margin gap is actually made of

 

AWI Cost of Doing Business Survey data shows an 11-point operating margin gap between top-quartile firms and the median. Same machines, same lumber, same labor market. For a $10 million shop, that is roughly $1.1 million more EBIT every year.

 

Here is the part that surprises people: top-quartile firms spend less on engineering payroll than bottom-quartile firms and still win. The advantage is not more engineers. It is the ability to release clean work early and know where every job stands. When we polled owners at an INNERGY Summit on what that would be worth, complete shop drawings four weeks early with all materials staged, 64% said their profit would more than double.

 

“Profitability is made prior to the sawdust, in estimating, engineering, and the flow of information long before a single part is cut.”

Marc Sanderson, CEO, INNERGY

 

The instinct is to hire. The constraint is usually the waiting.

 

When engineering runs behind, the default move is another drafter. Sometimes that is right. But capacity added to a serial process is still a serial process, and in a file-based desktop tool the hours go somewhere other than engineering:

• One person per job. A second drafter means a second file and a merge at the end. 

• Crashes on custom work, which is the work that pays best. 

• Performance that degrades as job size grows, on the projects the schedule can least absorb. 

• A recut loop that routes through whoever has the file open. 

None of that is engineering. It is waiting, redoing, and hand-carrying. You cannot hire your way out of a backlog whose real cause is that only one person can be in the room.

 

What we built, and why

 

INNERGY Engineering launched on August 19, 2026: cloud-native CAD/CAM built inside INNERGY ERP, developed and hardened alongside Early Adopter shops. It aims at one outcome above all others. Get engineering done faster, because faster engineering is more throughput, and throughput is margin.

 

Several people can design and engineer in the same project at the same time, with no file locking and no waiting for a colleague to close a file. Work saves continuously, so a crash no longer costs a morning. It runs on the hardware your team already owns, and updates arrive automatically instead of as manual installs. Because engineering lives inside the platform, drawings, bills of materials, and CNC output flow through to production and purchasing instead of being re-keyed.

 

It makes its in-person debut at IWF Atlanta 2026, August 25 to 28 at the Georgia World Congress Center.

 

Three questions before you buy anything

 

You do not need new software to find out whether engineering is your constraint. You need three numbers.

 

• How many days pass between award and released shop drawings, and how much of that is work versus backlog?
• How many people can be inside your largest active job right now, at the same time?
• How many times last week did an engineer stop engineering to unblock someone else?

 

If the answer to the second is “one” and the answer to the third is a number you do not like, capacity is not your problem. Access is. That is fixable, and worth fixing upstream while the margin is still there to protect.

 

See INNERGY Engineering in action. Request a walkthrough at innergy.com/demo, or find us at IWF Atlanta 2026, August 25 to 28.