Modern technology: love it or hate it.

How dependent we have become in recent years on new technologies; mobile phones, the internet, satnav and on and on ad nausium.

And, how infuriating it is when these technologies fail to do what we expect them to do. in the past few weeks, I have experienced a failure of my mobile phone, on which I keep my diary and my satnav. Having scraped by without them for three weeks, I have got my phone back; with the storage completely wiped. Syncing to my PC with ActiveSync restored all my contact and my diary but reinstalling CoPilot, given that telephone support is withdrawn six weeks after you buy it means that if you need help you have to do it by email, which makes the send and response process painfully slow and is ‘doing my brain in’.

Enough of my personal frustrations, let’s have a look at effect of technology on bespoke furniture production. As with all these technologies, the benefits do eventually outshine the downsides, although when they do fail you they still drive you crazy.

Naturally, designing fitted furniture for clients involves appointments to visit their homes, for which my Outlook diary and satnav are irreplaceable. But when the technology really kicks in is after we have taken an order. The first part of the process is converting the designer’s notes and sketches into a working drawing that’s initial purpose is to help manage the essential process of iteration to ensure that our customer understands what we are going to produce and, vitally, that we understand our client’s expectations.  This process used to be conducted on a drawing board using drawing (or tracing) paper, a ruler , protractor and Rotring drawing pen. Edits were made by scratching  out ink with a razor blade and redrawing.  The end result often got very scruffy. The final draft would then be photocopied and sometimes tidied up with Tippex and pens.

Today we have Autocad and derivative drafting software that reduces the drawing board time significantly and, more importantly, facilitates unlimited edits with no loss of quality. Also, you can’t cheat a digital drawing, dimensions are exact to a millimetre and will not allow the furniture to be too big for the space into which it is to be fitted (can happen).

After the client has carried out their first audit of the working drawings, we send a surveyor to check the measurements and any tricky angles or shapes. The surveyor will then carry out another audit with the client, reinforce all the choices of finish, colour, handles etcetera and explain the more esoteric details of the drawings. At this point we pick up any detail changes and the surveyor revises the drawings in the same software and resubmits them for our customers approval.

Then in a spreadsheet workbook containing about 5,000 product codes permutated across dozens of door styles or ranges in scores of finishes and millions of individual unit prices to check our pricing and establish whether the drawing revisions affect the total price so that any changes can be agreed with the customer.

The final detailed drawings are then interpreted by the factory production scheduler and the dimensions and specification of each individual piece of bespoke furniture are then fed into another software programme that deconstructs every cabinet, wardrobe, chest of doors etcetera into its component parts and prints out schedules for purchasing the raw materials specifically required to manufacture and install the order. It also produces cutting lists for preparing the materials for production.

Before such technological advances, all of this work of drawing the finished furniture installation, ordering and cutting the raw materials was was done with pencil paper and a calculator.  The opportunities for error were massive.

It is hard to believe we were able to function before the new technologies.  Somehow we did but I can remember well the grief when components arrived on site in the wrong material or the wrong size.  I cannot say that mistakes never creep in but with the aid of computers we have managed the problems down to a minimum.

Yes, when the new technologies go wrong it drives me crazy but there is no way we would choose to go back to what seems like the stone age but is probably just a couple of decades ago. Long live the digital revolution!