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EMS Broadens Product Offering Across Fencing and Hurricane Protection with Acquisition of AMD Supply TMCnet News [September 30, 2026] | / | EMS Broadens Product Offering Across Fencing and Hurricane Protection with Acquisition of AMD Supply EMS, a value-added distributor of aluminum products and a portfolio company of Wynnchurch Capital, L.P. ("Wynnchurch"), today announced the acquisition of AMD Supply ("AMD"), a distributor of fencing, hurricane shutters, and aluminum products serving the Southeastern United States. Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Deerfield Beach, Florida, AMD serves fence contractors, general contractors, manufacturers, dealers, and builders. AMD offers a broad portfolio of aluminum and vinyl fencing, hurricane shutters, standard and custom aluminum extrusions, tubular motors and accessories, screen doors, hardware, and castings. "AMD has built a differentiated business through its focus on customer service, product availability, and technical expertise," said Mike Swedick, CEO of EMS. "The acquisition expands our offering across fencing and hurricane protection products. We are excited to welcome the AMD team to EMS and support AMD's continued growth." Across Wynnchurch's ownership, EMS has completed eight acquisitions, including AMD. Foley & Lardner LLP acted as legal advisor to EMS and Wynnchurch. About EMS: Headquartered in Lake Worth, Florida, EMS is a value-added distributor of aluminum products serving a variety of industrial, commercial, residential, and marine end markets. Founded in 1982 with a single Forida location, EMS has expanded into new regions and now operates more than 20 distribution and manufacturing facilities totaling nearly two million square feet. For more information, please visit: https://www.easternmetal.com. About AMD: Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Deerfield Beach, Florida, AMD is a distributor of aluminum and vinyl fencing, hurricane shutters, standard and custom aluminum extrusions, tubular motors and accessories, screen doors, hardware, and castings. AMD serves customers across Florida, the Southeastern United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. For more information, please visit: www.amdaluminum.com. About Wynnchurch Capital: Wynnchurch Capital, L.P. is a private equity investment firm that has been investing in industrial businesses for more than 25 years. Wynnchurch is currently investing out of its sixth private equity fund and manages approximately $9.1 billion of assets under management. The firm's strategy is to partner with companies that possess the potential for substantial growth and profit improvement. Wynnchurch specializes in recapitalizations, growth capital, management buyouts, corporate carve-outs, and restructurings. Recent exits include the sale of FloWorks to Ferguson Enterprises Inc. (NYSE: FERG) in a transaction valued at approximately $1.6 billion and the sale of Labrie Environmental Group to Hiab Corporation (Nasdaq Helsinki: HIAB) in a transaction valued at approximately $1.04 billion. Recent investments include MSHS Pacific Power Group, Sterno, NABRICO Marine Products, Charter Industries, and Astro Shapes. For more information, please visit: www.wynnchurch.com or follow Fog Computing World on LinkedIn. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260930459919/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage] |

UDig, Ferguson launch Sales Cockpit to streamline counter Sales. September 22, 2026 UDig designed and built Sales Cockpit with Ferguson, a value-added distributor of commercial and residential supplies servicing plumbing, HVAC, and other trade professionals. UDig creates digital experiences and frontline tools people want to use. The collaboration brings many of the sales systems Ferguson's counter associates use every day into one interface, cutting down on any back-and-forth between systems when contractors are waiting at the counter. Sales Cockpit is currently in initial deployment at a limited number of Ferguson branches with plans to expand in the months ahead. Contractors run on tight schedules, and every minute at the counter is a minute they're not on a job site. Sales Cockpit is designed to help associates search, quote, and close orders without switching screens so they can get contractors back on the road faster. The platform also brings Ferguson's modernized payment technology into the counter workflow. "Contractors don't have time to spare, and the associates helping them don't either," said Gordon Kelly, executive vice oresident at UDig. "We started by getting clear on what makes Ferguson different at the counter, then built alongside associates in their branches to drive adoption. We leveraged AI-native delivery to shorten cycle times and build quickly. The result is that associates can stay focused on the person in front of them, with the systems behind the counter working quietly in the background." "Sales Cockpit brings the systems our associates use every day into one cohesive, intuitive interface, built around the workflows and flexibility our associates already know," said Jeff Walbert, senior vice president of operations at Ferguson. "Working with UDig, we moved quickly without losing that focus. I'm looking forward to seeing how these improvements help our teams serve customers with greater speed and build on the strong relationships that define Ferguson." UDig will share more about Sales Cockpit and its work with Ferguson to support trade professionals at the Industrial Supply Association Fall Summit, Oct. 27 in San Antonio, Texas.

How national distributors decide where to build next. Sep 3, 2026 Where a distribution center goes matters. See how nationwide building, land cover, and parking data help distributors identify the right sites faster. Facility placement is a speed problem before it's a real estate problem. Get a distribution network's geography wrong, and no amount of warehouse automation fixes the extra day it takes a truck to reach a customer three states away. Why site selection matters. For a company running dozens of distribution centers and hundreds of branches, where a building sits determines what a customer actually experiences: an order that arrives next-day instead of two days late, a delivery route that runs efficiently instead of wastefully, or a new metro area that gets served well instead of left thin. Ferguson, the building-products distributor, put it plainly when announcing a new Ohio facility: "Our distribution centers are the heart of our supply chain," said Al Byrd, the company's senior vice president of supply chain. The site itself shows the logic in practice: a 400,000-square-foot distribution center on a 77-acre site in Celina, Ohio, chosen specifically for its proximity to Ferguson's other Midwest locations, letting the company reach customers even next-day. None of those decisions get made on a hunch. They get made by comparing dozens or hundreds of candidate sites against the same set of questions: how big is the available parcel, what's already built on it, how close is it to the customers and suppliers that matter, and how much room is there to expand later. The evaluation process. Answering those questions at the scale a national network operates at means working from data that covers the whole country consistently, not a patchwork of local surveys pulled together site by site. A network strategy team comparing a candidate site in Texas against one in Oregon needs both evaluated the same way, on the same resolution, updated on the same schedule, or the comparison isn't really apples to apples. If you're evaluating a single site, this is easier than it sounds. You commission a survey, you walk the property, you make the call. The moment you're comparing that site against dozens of others in different states, the math changes. You can't schedule a site visit for every candidate before a quarterly planning deadline, and you can't trust a different local vendor in each state to have measured a parking lot or a floodplain the same way. What you need instead is one dataset, built the same way everywhere, so a site in Ohio and a site in Texas are actually being judged on the same terms. That's where building footprint and land cover data earn their keep. Knowing the precise footprint, height, and layout of what's already built on a parcel tells a site-selection team how much of a lot is usable before they ever schedule a site visit. Land cover data shows what's actually on the ground around a candidate site, pavement, vegetation, open land, which shapes both site readiness and how much future expansion room realistically exists. And because a distribution center's footprint typically includes acres of parking and staging area, parking and lot data matter just as much as the building itself when comparing candidate sites for truck court capacity and dock access. What the data needs to deliver. EarthDefine's Building Footprints 3D dataset covers over 183 million commercial and residential structures across the continental United States, derived from LiDAR and 60-centimeter-resolution aerial imagery, precise enough to distinguish a building from the trees around it. Land Cover and Impervious datasets classify what's on the ground at the same resolution, and Parking lot data maps and staging capacity directly. All three are built to be compared consistently, market to market, which makes a nationwide site-selection process comparable rather than relying on region-specific data. Good data narrows a long list of candidates down to the handful worth that kind of scrutiny; it doesn't replace the scrutiny itself.