a. Creating Customer Awareness, Training, and Servicing
In April 1998, the first service bureau in Turkey was established by 4C Engineering as well as a few JewelCAD seats were sold, and from the on, we, as 4C Engineering started to train people free-of-charge in JewelCAD. Furthermore, cooperation aggreements were signed with some of the Goverment Universities for the training of Design Students in JewelCAD.
It was the first time in the Turkish Jewellery Industry that jewellery companies were meeting with designers who were graduates of different universities. It was a tremendous career change fort he designers as well, since until then they were employed in other sectors, and worked mostly in unrelated positions to their educational background. It was another milestone in the Turkish Jewellery History, as of 1998 designers were employed in the Jewellery Sector.
Within less than a year, 10 or more jewellery makers actively started to work on their computers, created CAD files and then transferred these files into master wax models through MMII, yielding approximately 2 to 3 models on a weekly basis.
The breaking point of this story was the training of the Model Makers who were mostly almost illeterate, primary school drop outs, and who started to work as MM in small Jewellery shops at the age of 10-12 years old.
We have made tremendous efforts to convince these persons as to computer aided design will make up for the most time consuming and tiring part of their workmanship in wax carving or master model making in silver manually. We talked and explained these people that when they start to use JewelCAD putting their experience into what they draw, they would hold their wax models out of the RP machine only in a couple of hours with perfect geometry, instead of long and tiresome days.
b. Achievements
Naturally, it was a long and tough process to obtain the acceptance of this concept by these persons who are mostly over the age of 45, and who had never touched the mouse of a computer in their whole life.
We invited them for free training, supplied free wax models for their initial model trials,and granted permission for Demo version JewelCAD usage for a considerable duration of time.
Although only a few of them completed the full training package, nearly all started to consider that CAD and RP would be the unevitable players in their near future business lifes.
2001 was the year that JewelCAD and RP sales started to boost. We had trained nearly 60 talented students from Design Faculties of many Universities, and 10 very talented Model Makers who have pushed their bosses to adapt this system in their production line.
c. Key Advantage
In my vision, conservative industries has a key advantage in applying new technologies such that if you can sell a new technology to one or two leading companies, followers do not spend too much time in investigating, but apply the same technology very fast, just because they do not want to fall back in competition even without proper facilities and personel for functioning such high technologies. However, for this case, they turned out to be lucky because we supplied nonstop, 24 hours of maintenance and service support which literally meant that in the middle of the night, we ran to the factory of our customer for repairs within an hour; we supplied customized software according to their needs, and we supplied trained personel, technicians and designers: technicians who can run the system hired one day after the hiring of a designer we have trained.
d. Current Status of the Market
Typical sales figure; 60-75 seats for JewelCAD and 15-20 Soliscape RP machine per year since 2001.
Average of new models produced in Turkey every day is around 400 which is nearly 15 times more than what they had been doing in 2000.
More important than the boost in the total number of new models, the perfect geometry, pre-defined weight, easily redesignable models obtained through the most cost and time efficient techniques have uncomparable market value to the hand-made models independent of the manual talent. A good comparative sample is a very talented Model Maker can make a master model within 4 to 5 days whereas RP machine has the capacity to produce up to 5 rings in 24 hours, 25 rings in 5 days resulting in an investment return within less than 6 months on the basis of what manually is produced versus what the RP can produce within the same time frame.
In Turkey, there are more than 40,000 people working in Jewellery Industry, most of whom have been employed within the last 3 years. Another important improvement in Jewellery Industry is the employment of better or well educated people instead of unskilled and cheap labour.
As the CAD and RP applications increased in the Jewellery Industry, other technologies like vacuum casting, high end wax injection machines, silicone molds, advanced polishing systems, better alloys for better casting and higher quality precious stones had find their ways easier for the access into the same market.
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