SDG has built a five-year relationship with a leading natural resource corporation – from developing portfolio and business unit strategies to optimizing operating assets and information technologies.

Recently, our client turned to us to unleash the full value of its already successful engineered wood products. EWP is manufactured lumber made by laminating the strongest parts of wood into consistently strong products that can be cut into almost any size and delivered in structural lumber that won’t warp, bow, or fail at hidden voids like natural lumber. For builders and homeowners, that means strong floors that don’t squeak.

EWPs are high value-added products that require continuous innovation, a high level of customer service, and assured availability. But the ingredients for success — including the culture required to run this type of business — are very different from the organization's commodity businesses. So one of our primary deliverables was to create a new EWP organization with clear roles and expectations, focused solely on delivering full value from the product.

The project was extraordinarily successful in two critical ways. Financially, our client has enjoyed a growth surge more than double the already robust industry average of 15% per year. And culturally, this effort has created a blueprint for how the commodity organization can effectively spawn high value-added businesses.