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No doubt you have come across the CAD/CAM
acronyms many times in the past few years; the
technological phenomenon that may eventually put
jewellery manufacturing in the layman’s hands. This is
a typical sales pitch presented by CAD/CAM vendors
and may not accurately represent any of the good, or
bad, decisions of investing in this exciting new
development.
CAD stands for computer aided design, while
CAM is an abbreviation for computer aided/assisted
manufacturing. You may have discussed these
technology options with your staff, your bench jewellers
or your accountant, and heard some good reasons why
NOT to jump in. The prohibitive cost, concerns about
training and then the loss of those trained staff, the fear
of industrial mechanisation of an artisan trade, and of
course ignorance of the technology itself.
Before you take the plunge into what can be a
very expensive or foolish investment, jewellers should
consider a number of questions. What is CAD? Is it for
you? Is it for your business? Is it for your staff? Does
your business model support it? Is it only for
manufacturing? Is it for design? Is it for sales? Is your
investment secure? Which CAD should you get, which
CAM? |
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Design benefits
In its most basic form, CAD is for design only –
design with the happy side effect that the design can be
produced by means of various CAM methods into a
piece of actual jewellery – a carbon copy of the drawing
on the screen – and herein lies its greatest benefit and
downfall. There is little loss in translation between the design presented to the client and the final product;
what you see is what you get. Effectively you reduce the
time, errors and money spent in the ‘best-guess’ business
of converting a pencil sketch into a piece of jewellery.
Reading a client’s mind is never an easy business.
Assuming they can read yours, or interpret your sketches
is an even bigger problem.
The design down side is a rather large one. What
you see is what you get. So, if you design a bad piece,
mechanically speaking you will get a bad piece. This is
no different from asking a jeweller to make a bad design
– typically, however, a jeweller will secretly make
corrections for sales people’s awry sketches and bad
design principals. CAD is smart, but also dumb. The
oldest computing adage applies: GIGO – garbage in,
garbage out.
A second, and less known, benefit of CAD for
design is the ability it gives a business to hold an infinite
array of virtual inventory. Each piece has an exact
manufacturing cost, material and stone weight correctly
assigned to it. |
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The idea of virtual inventory goes beyond the
domain of online vendors and into the realm of the sales
floor. Marrying the actual stock with a design inventory
allows you to utilise the parametric nature of CAD to
hold a limitless array of design iterations. Present a
client with an actual piece to examine and hold a dozen
design variations in a booklet, all produced and rendered
with no outlay other than the time spent designing using
CAD. A virtual stock hold worth millions, for the price
of a single CAD installation.
This stock hold can be also used as a very
effective advertising medium. The lines between this
type of advertising and the crossover to virtual inventory
have started to blend. Some companies can pre-sell an
entire range before ever having had a single model
produced.
This parametric nature of CAD also helps reduce
redesign time significantly; allowing your designer and
jeweller to produce far more in less time, with the added
benefit that ‘no go’ designs for one client may very well
be useful for another, or simply to add to your virtual
inventory. |
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CAD in sales
CAD in sales has been limited to large scale
manufacturing plants until now, yet it has been a very effective one. The advent of new smarter and slimmer
technology allows the sales team to take devices like
iPads or TabletPCs onto the sales floor. Younger (and
increasingly older) buyers are aware of CAD because
of the massive surge in online vendors who use it to
finalise designs prior to manufacturing.
Almost everyone nowadays has some form of
smartphone or mobile computing device, so bringing
technology onto the sales floor is no longer taboo. A
quick tally finds five CAD drawing applications for
iPhone/iPad and a dozen or so ‘CAD viewers’ (that will
allow you to view CAD files but not create them) for
industries from cabinet making to house design and
automotive design, and almost every new luxury item
you have bought, from the car to the yacht has had its
roots in CAD or CAM.
Jewellery manufacturing or sales cannot escape
this logical evolution. Programmes like Gemvision’s
CounterSketch can soon be brought onto the sales floor
on a tablet-sized PC and the process of designing an
entire ring can be done by the client, with no knowledge
of CAD required. Drag a slider here, make the ring
bigger, drag a slider there, make the centre stone
bigger, click a button and swap the metal from 9K to
18K.
This will without a doubt change the way we sell
custom-made jewellery. CAD will free sales people from having to consult a manufacturing jeweller to find
out if the item is practical to produce and what the item
will cost. In fact, the sale is actually made by the client.
If the client doesn’t like the price they are free to drag
the shank thinner themselves, sparing a few dollars in
weight but enabling them to see the big impact it has on
the overall design. The piece is produced, set and
finished and delivered back to you in two weeks. No
headaches. |
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The downside to this sales application of CAD is
that if there are no local servicers at present, then it must be serviced abroad and your hard earned money leaves
the country. Hopefully this will change and more users
will be able to be serviced locally in future.
Manufacturing CAD
This subject is a massive one to tackle and will not
be resolved fully for at least another 10 years – by
which time all manufacturers will be using this technology. The biggest factor to consider when
implementing CAD for manufacturing in your
workshop is surprisingly, the human factor. Consider
that most older bench jewellers who saw the quartz
movement kill watchmaking will view any new
technology on the bench with a wary eye.
Allaying this fear is the primary goal or your
entire installation will suffer – because it is exactly these
jewellers who are required to make the system work
properly, make sure no one inputs bad design principles. |
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The ‘GIGO’ effect
CAD is a programme– only a programme – andas such its output is dependent on the jeweller or
designer’s input. Give two jewellers the same saw
frame and you will get two different results. And herein
lies CAD’s biggest advantage and also its biggest downfall. People with no natural or learnt ability on the
bench are able to use CAD to produce jewellery – even
fantastically complicated pieces – but the question
remains, will that piece be practical or durable.
Unfortunately the answer, most of the time, is no.
The majority of people who are actively learning
CAD now have no experience with what constitutes a
viable piece of jewellery. This has resulted in the
proliferation of cheap, light and poorly conceived
models hitting the retail market. Jewellery that is so
weak, that even whispering the word ultrasonic
anywhere near it makes three stones fall out.
There is currently a recruitment drive by larger
manufacturers to employ classically trained bench jewellers to write engineering standards for their CAD
departments to overcome this problem.
The simple and undeniable fact is that bench
jewellers actually make the best CAD artists and they
tend to ramp up the learning curve much faster. Jewellers
need to invest in their staff because CAD will not
replace them, it will merely augment what they do. The
marriage of CAD to a good bench jeweller is a remarkable
thing to witness, allowing that jeweller to produce more
- better and faster than he could have ever imagined.
If you do not have access to a manufacturing
jeweller it may be worth your while to invest in a short
course on jewellery manufacturing to give you a few
basic ideas about casting and setting requirements –
this will pay off far more than repetitive CAD lessons
from different providers.
Simply put, CAD is a reality in the here and now
– not in some distant future. It has arrived and jewellers
need to know how to make it work for them, to earn
income. |
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