Craft firms, step into the digital world!

Digital is making its presence felt more and more across all markets. But what about craft workshops, joiners, carpenters, fitters-out? What do they stand to gain by going digital?

In a changing market, where a host of small local structures rub shoulders with multinational corporations, these small firms must optimize their production and their manufacturing process. If they are producing less and less in the way of repeat production, they need to diversify what they produce. Today this means working with new materials in combination with composites. In the BIM age, they have a simple choice: either adapt or die. Going digital will enable artisans to optimize productivity as well as improve interaction with partners and order givers and up their game in responsiveness. Digital will open their way to performance, profitability, and versatility.

Digital as a sales and productivity lever

In the instant information era, customers expect instant answers to their enquiries. A traditional drawing office using hand drafting can’t offer that kind of responsiveness, whereas 3D design software will enable much faster production of precise, value-adding visuals, helping customers to immerse themselves in the project and thus be more eager to buy. Going digital also helps manage flows and the production implementation process in order to achieve optimization, by, for example, eliminating unnecessary movements or handling operations during manufacture. It can also automate materials transfer, resulting in higher performance for the business while making work less strenuous and repetitive.

Falling costs

Contrary to the common idea, going digital is not ruinously expensive for a craft firm. Since the 1990s, thanks to mass production, the cost of investing in an NC machine is falling. Machining centres that twenty years ago cost €150,000 now cost in the region of €70,000.
Investment can be and ought to be done in stages. One starts by acquiring design software, which is the key to the digital workshop, then continues investing step by step in the machines, starting with those that will yield the biggest productivity increases.

As an alternative, firms can always choose hiring. It makes equipment accessible while ensuring it can be regularly renewed and the employees always trained up.

Conditions for success

Ahead of the project, the craft firm must accurately define its requirements, take time to think, assess available resources, set objectives, and choose a strategy. Then it must seek assistance in the digitization process—collaborative assistance with the employees and all other parties involved in order to remove the mystery surrounding digital tools through information and training. They need to be reassured that going digital doesn’t mean they’ll lose their jobs but that they will work differently, pursuing more interesting tasks. They must be made to understand the interest for both the company and themselves. It’s a guarantee that the digitization project will succeed.

Last but not least, going digital has two effects—a short-term effect that helps optimize production and profits, and a longer-term effect whereby the owner, on retirement, can sell a well-equipped digitized business for a lot more than one that turns a blind eye to the digital revolution.

See the video from the Bati-journal TV stage: Investment in craftsmanship

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