Using Cutweb to gain competitive advantages.

In today's dynamic and highly competitive world it becomes more and more important to gain competitive advantages to keep profits and ensure a bright future to the company. Competitive advantage is  defined as an advantage that one firm has relative to competing firms.

The main issue with this advantage is that it must be sustainable. Traditionally an effective advantage should be:

• Difficult to mimic;
• Unique;
• Sustainable;
• Superior to the competition;
• applicable to multiple;

There are many ways to pursue these advantages, however many experts say that in today's fast-changing world there is no advantage that can be sustained in the long term. That's why the ultimate advantage is a quick and agile organisation that can monitor the changes in the markets and competition and quickly react to them.

This is true for any company, from the biggest to the smallest. Unluckily for small companies often it is very hard to find ways to improve product quality or reduce production costs.

How a nesting software can be involved in such a scenario? Apparently it allows just material, time and labour savings (these savings can be of important amounts but they seem to have a light relationship with organisation agility). This can be true for traditional "off-line" nesting software, but with CUTWEB we must make further considerations...

CUTWEB is an innovative web based application that delivers cutting-edge automatic nesting technology in ASP mode and is charged in pay-per-use basis. This is a huge improvement over traditional nesting solutions since these are often a quite expensive requiring software licenses and powerful computers to handle the computing burden. These issues often kept away many companies from the  automatic nesting world since the costs involved could be afforded by big companies only so that the smallest ones lost an important tool to improve their competitiveness.

Now the advantages of automatic nesting are available through the Internet and for a small pay-per-use fees schema so that even the smallest companies can profit by the advantages of the automatic nesting. The advantages provides go far beyond material, time and labour saving. Actually using a traditional nesting solution time, labour and material savings are the most important ones that you can expect from the system. Being on-line and having bills calculated using flexible and affordable schemas CUTWEB benefits of an extra boost that can bring much higher advantages.

CUTWEB can certainly achieve all the advantages related to a traditional nesting solution but enables news ways to think about the work organisation and relationships with customers, suppliers, and subcontractors so that it becomes an actual tool to gain competitive advantages with a much wider span than time and cost savings.

Let's analyse some of the most important competitive advantages sources, these are analysed in a more detailed way on String's site.

Cost estimation

Costs are always a topic of the highest importance in each company but they can be hard to measure and to estimate. Talking about automatic nesting and cutting, the most critical cost is the material that might be needed to cut an order. Work and machine time are much easier to estimate since the throughput is well known but the actual yield of a batch of materials is a much harder question. Ultimately material cost is the most important factor in making cost estimating, used for example to propose offer to would-be customers. That's why CUTWEB is a source of competitive advantage: a company that can make the most accurate estimations spending the minimal time and money has the information that is crucial for an offer. CUTWEB allows to perform actual nesting tests on the actual order data so the material usage is not assumed: in a few minutes and with a negligible cost it is possible to obtain the actual figures. Without CUTWEB it is still possible to get these information but this takes so much time that it is not convenient. The bottom line is that companies using CUTWEB can make precise quotations quickly, almost automatically and at a negligible cost, while companies not using CUTWEB can propose approximate quotations spending more time and resources to produce them. It is clear how CUTWEB can be an important asset to gain more customers and be confident that the quotations do not underestimate material costs. You can find a deeper analysis of this topic here

Coordinating subcontractors.

Often companies work with subcontractors or act as subcontractors for other companies. This is brings advantages to both the sides but introduces some inefficiencies that would not arise if the production was fully internalised. Some of the issues often met involve communication problems (different data formats, different ways to organise production data and so on), monitoring the production progress, control over the materials used and many others. CUTWEB can address these topics allowing different companies to exchange data seamlessly, making data more reliable and providing on-line automatic nesting to all the subcontractors involved. In this case CUTWEB advantage derives from the huge improvements in the relationships with third parties, the reduction of transaction cost, higher flexibility,  and many benefits in the whole organisation. This situation is analysed in details here and here.

Add values to your products.

In some industries an interesting option to gain competitive advantage are the services offered together with the products sold. CUTWEB for example can be successfully used to offer services to customers, introducing a new variable in the competition. A typical case is the producer of a material, let's say rolls that are bought by companies that cut them accordingly with orders received by customers. Usually the companies that cut the material (converters) buy the rolls then they have to optimise the cutting on their own (often optimisation is strongly dependent upon the skill of an experienced worker). CUTWEB can transform this market: the producer of the material can propose access to reserved areas of CUTWEB to the customers (each one with his own private area) there they can upload their orders, have them automatically nested and compare the results of different material batches. So they can buy the best batch along with the nesting already made, ready to cut as soon as it arrives at their premises. The competitive advantages for all the parties involved are clear: the material producer gains customer loyalty, new customers can be attracted by the advantage of this organisation and moves the competition from a price/quality context to a price/quality/service one, gaining flexibility and getting new strategic opportunities. The converter can achieve huge savings buying the material with highest yields already nested and ready to cut. They save time, material cost and they do not need any more skilled operators to manage the optimisation. It is clear that a company proposing this offer gains huge advantages, and her customers in turn can propose better conditions to their customers so they can get more customers and better margins as well. Surely another company might propose a similar system but the advantage of the first mover are hard to beat and it takes time to match such a competition, so the first mover has time to take measures to counter the competitor's actions. You can find a complete analysis of this topic here.

Deskilling of workers.

Often material optimisation is performed by skilled and experienced operators. Due to their skill and experience they are both an asset and a threat for the company for which they work. Of course they allow to save time and material, but they are at the same time a strategic resource, and they know it so the company is always exposed to their request that can hardly be disregarded, moreover if they leave the job for any reason the company lose a valuable asset. Even worse they might start working for a competitor, providing him with an instant advantage. CUTWEB allows a company to get rid of this problem because the automatic nesting and cutting make useless skilled and experienced operators, so the company achieves more flexibility, reduces the danger to lose a strategic resource and saves cost.

The bottom line.

Whoever involved in the nesting or cutting business, even indirectly should seriously look at CUTWEB as a possible source of competitive advantage. An advantage that can be gained at a cost affordable even by the smallest companies and that can really make the difference. Actually there are many more scenarios in which CUTWEB usage can turn into a big advantage, contacting STRING you can talk with their experts that can help you to figure out how to improve your organisation using CUTWEB String in fact is much more than a software house, they are your nesting partner and can provide professional advice on production management and competitive strategy since the team includes some consultants graduated in Economics and familiar with the nesting and cutting in several industries.