We are in 2017 and you certainly don’t need to have ten diopters to see, to clearly realize that things, professions, jobs, people, have changed: the whole world has changed.
In the last ten, fifteen years – a very short period of time – the world has undergone or createdd an incredible series of technological revolutions. Clear, unequivocal demonstration is plain to all, and takes shape every day in thousands of concrete examples …
To make some examples, just think about taxis: working as a taxist has always meant investing money in a license to deliver the transportation of people. Eight years ago, a company was born, which today is considered to be the largest taxi company in the world. This company is called Uber, it is American, it operates all over the planet and is growing steadily.
But how can a company in the eight years become the world’s largest taxi company?
What is the capital behind such a big company?
How did they distribute taxis to serve virtually the entire planet?
And finally … how many taxis have they bought?
Well the answer is as frightening as it is stimulating … Uber owns zero taxis.
If we completely change the sector and think about the business of room rental, in 2007 – just ten years ago – a company called airBnB has seen the light and now it is the largest room rental company in the world.
Do you have an idea of? How many rooms to be rented airBnB has around the world? Once again the number is composed of a single digit … zero!
And the largest warehouses in the world? They are Chinese, but they are not warehouses as we have always meant them, there are no bricks, no concrete, no shelves … It’s just a company named Alibaba, founded in 1999, which through e-commerce now manages over 30 Billions of dollars sales a year; yet they have no warehouses.
In the same way, we could talk about Facebook, Google, or thousands of other situations that show us clearly, concretely, indisputably that today – thanks to technology, computers, the internet (which only 26 years ago did not exist) – we live in a a very different world.
One of the problems that many Italian companies are experiencing is that many have not really noticed all this change, of these upheavals in society, or they have ignored them, or are so afraid of them that stay out of the reach.
Our craft businesses have realized that fewer customers arrive, they realize that at the end of the month they count less money, they are bothered by the fact that materials like pvc or, more appropriately, plastics, have entered the market. But if you put them in front of the need to innovate, to start using cutting edge tools and technology, to the usefulness of organizing and managing enterprise resources (machinery, materials, people) adequately, in too many cases the answer is “… butI’ve always done it this way!”
Basically, it is so easy to sit down, to wait for things to change by themselves, then some people with great skill use the most devastating and shared alibi in Italy “eh … there is the crisis!”.
How to say, “If there is a crisis … what can I do?”, “It’s not my fault … it is the fault of the crisis, of the government, of politicians, of the chemical sciences!”
Faced with this discharge of responsibility, the entrepreneur gives up: after all he has tried to do everything, but if there is a crisis there is a crisis, so it is not his fault.
Surely he is also convinced that things will continue to work, maybe not as well as before, but they’ll still work. I apologize for the risk of being unpopular, but it is not so: I’m sorry, but things do not work so.
There are many examples of global and local companies that we never thought could disappear, yet for their “I’ve always done it this way” they have not been able to grasp technological transformations … they have not been able to innovate and today they exist no more
Just to make some examples of global companies …
Do you remember Kodak? A powerful brand, so powerful that Kodak meant photography and photography meant Kodak. Do you remember advertising with the “ciribiribì … Kodak” little monster?
The company, born in 1888, thanks to the technology of photographic rolls entered the homes of all over the world, but it has not been able to upgrade to the novelties of technology and in 2012 it ended up in controlled administration.
Or Blockbuster: the company was born in 1985 and in a very short time it became the world’s most popular movie and video game rental brand. Thousands of stores in every corner of the planet, an absolute power. Unfortunately, however, they did not understand and lacked foresight for a phenomenon that was spreading more and more, that is fiber optic cabling all over the planet.
Below the Blockbuster stores, miles and miles of cables began to run, which only a few years later would make the physical rental of videocassettes obsolete in favour of digital streaming. New companies have emerged on this new technology, able to capture the new opportunities offered by new technologies such as Netflix, the various pay per view … consequently in 2013 Blockbuster pulled down the last shop’s shutter for the last time.
Of course, there are a host of other examples of both global and local companies where the phrase “I’ve always done it this way” was the main reason for collapse, for closure despite blood, sacrifices, passion poured into the company. Unfortunately, it is not the crisis that kills companies: what kills companies is the inability to react to market changes, which sometimes takes the name, so beloved by many, of … “crises”.
So how shall we react to the crisis? What is the magic wand? Does it really work in the wood field too?
A successful company was based in the past, and even more today, on two key points: first of all, innovation. Today we are in a market which is saturated of everything and for this reason it is necessary to create new products or new services continuously: we have to test, to experiment, to build with the goal of being attractive to customers.
Just watch cars, cell phones … who wants to compete on the market must be constantly evolving. There is no room for those who sleep: market space is not given by anyone, you have to take it with shots of innovation.
Innovations need to come off quickly with more and more advanced, more and more flexible technological tools, through more and more automated production processes that allow you to keep both times and costs constantly under control. Today a carpentry produces no more giant orders, maybe in the future we’ll come back to produce giant commissions, but today it is not so, today it is necessary to be ready to produce a lot of small varied orders and therefore it is necessary to be equipped.
But we must also know how to sell: in the seventies having a good product was enough, but with the arrival of the 1980s, the only product was not enough anymore. By leaving the evolution of the sale for now, we can certainly say that in 2017 having a good product is not a sufficient reason to be able to sell.
Even if we have the most beautiful product in the world, if it is presented in a dark, narrow corner, full of dust, with no information that highlights the qualities and needs it can meet, that product won’t be bought by anyone, or if someone buys it, he can buy it only at “chinese prices”.
Unfortunately, selling for the sake of selling, with very small margins, is like setting up a time bomb in your company, because if there is no margin, where does the company find money to refinance, invest in technology / marketing and then innovate and attract clients again?
This article is meant to give you a little shake to make it clear that there is much to do: it is not time to surrender, you have to use your head, inform yourself, analyze and get useful news to become familiar with new technologies which can make our companies more competitive on the market and learn how to use the right tools to master the daily challenges.
In the coming months, we will take care of two paramount aspects that will increase our awareness of our business choices in the field of technology.
We will therefore talk about Industry 4.0, and how these new practices should be applied within the joinery in order to improve the interconnection among the production departments and, more generally, among all the departments that form the joinery.
Furthermore, we will talk about software, with the aim of analyzing and understanding those parameters, variables and tasks that today must be entrusted to software as a tool for controlling the company in order to reduce costs, waste and business risks while increasing productivity, flexibility, versatility and sales capability.
As we have already said, the phrase “I’ve always done it this way” no longer makes sense to exist and as further proof of this, I quote the famous British biologist and naturalist Charles Darwin who, after his studies on the evolution of species, in the 1800s understood that “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change”. And if Darwin says that I would not underestimate it …
Until next time with a first contribution about “Industry 4.0”.
Stefano Frignani