Wai Innovation decided sometime around late 2022 that just cutting stuff wasn’t good enough. It was great being the only profile cutter in the area, but what if that wasn’t always the case? We couldn’t use being in quiet old Wanaka as a crutch; if we wanted to do our jobs better, we’d have to do some serious self-reflection first.
The result of that exercise is evidenced by 4 big efforts:
Instill a spirit of continuous improvement in everything we do. If you’re a subscriber to any sort of lean manufacturing zealotry, this phrase will come as no surprise to you.
Upskill the team and use professional-grade tools for nesting and post-processing of all our cutting jobs. We’ve got a few thousand pieces of material kicking around, and for each and every one, we know both its shape and its location in our little universe. When you send us your parts, our software goes and finds the best-suited piece of your specified material, nests your parts to that piece of material, and writes the machine code, whether it’s for the fiber laser or the waterjet. Then, another system we designed tells us where that piece of material is, developed in part with the amazing NFC tech of our upstairs neighbours, Scannable. After we cut your parts and make sure they pass our quality checks, the new shape (and location) of the remaining piece of material gets logged in our system so we can do it all again tomorrow. Why is this important? It means a lot less labour looking for material, a lot less labour writing programs with lesser tools, and basically zero effort put towards managing our massive database of material remnants. All of that translates to faster service, lower prices, and a happier team. Last time we checked, those are all good things.
Going beyond our specialist software for our laser, waterjet, and material inventory, we have partnered with Takticians for a life changing bit of software known as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). If you’re familiar with this type of software, you know how crucial it is, and if you’re not, what you need to know is that it allows us to track our hundreds of jobs every month with fewer errors and less overhead than the way it’d be done otherwise (spreadsheets, physical job cards, or a Ouija board). We’ve done the hard yards with Takticians to make sure that this software has the user’s best interests in mind, is intuitive to learn and use, and is stuffed with the best tech to handle the twists and turns our customers can throw at us. Remember the part about fewer errors and less overhead? That means you’ll get your parts faster, at lower cost, and with higher quality than you would otherwise. If that’s not a win, what is?
Self-service parts via our webshop. Somebody had to do it in New Zealand. In the rest of the developed world, this is not an exotic concept. Straight-up remove the model of filling out an online form, attaching some files, waiting between hours and a week for a quote, changing a material thickness, waiting for a new quote, accepting a quote, waiting however long for your parts, or maybe even finding out that you’re too small a customer for the laser cutting company to care about you. Let’s just put that in the bin. How about you upload your files, see a price instantly, order your parts right then and there, and have them turn up via courier a few days later? We were the first to bring this to NZ, and seeing our competitors directly copy our work only reinforces that imitation is the greatest form of flattery.
