Computer Mat Cutter

Many people who work with CMCs let themselves be misled by the amazing speed of the machine. Perhaps this is because it is mostly men who work with it – men who have kept alive that “little boy within” who loves all things mechanical. I’m not at all saying it’s a bad thing – but it can sometimes lead to drawing the wrong conclusions.

After all, when it comes to selling custom frames and especially mounts, it isn’t the production that’s time-consuming: it’s the customer counselling.

A framer spends an average of 15 minutes helping his client decide on a custom mount, but only 1.5 minutes cutting it by hand: using a CMC will only save him 1 minute.

When counselling an artist with an exhibition project including 20 artworks, the counselling time averages around 6 minutes per mount, or 120 minutes in total. Compare this to around 30 minutes for production by hand and 10 minutes using a CMC.

The following 3 examples show you, in the first diagram, the time spent when cutting by hand compared with, in the second diagram, the time when using a CMC. They also show the proportion of counselling to production time (white : black).

Distribution of counselling and production time.

                                  Counselling                                                                                                   Production

1 mount with 1 opening

20 mounts with various opening sizes

1 mount with 20 openings

As you can see, counselling usually takes much more time than production, which goes quickly. The mount with 20 openings constitutes an exception. In this example, we assumed 2 hours for counselling and 2 hours for production by hand as the basis for our calculation. The last diagram shows quite clearly that the CMC has a great advantage over cutting by hand: production time is reduced to 2 minutes. Nevertheless, the CMC cannot reduce the 2 hours counselling time. 120 minutes of counselling time versus 2 minutes production time can be expected for a framing job like this.

Our OFS eliminates all counselling time! It does away with 120 minutes of counselling involved when a customer orders 20 mounts for an exhibition, and also eliminates the counselling time spent in the case of a mount with 20 different openings.

We simply leave the design work up to the customers, who can make use of an online design environment with perfect visualisations.

Please check up on us and the great claims we’re making by having a look at the multiple-opening mounts that artists and photographers have designed and ordered on PPWRD’s website over the last 30, 60 and 90 days – usually without any counselling. The designs are quite interesting for a number of reasons, but often they are simply entertaining as well: enjoy.

Summary: Our software is used to tackle the major issue of customised framing: counselling time. With inexperienced walk-in customers, counselling time cannot be shortened; our software can, however, improve the counselling with its visualisations. With clients who have some basic knowledge in pictures, mounts and framing, it cuts out an enormous amount of counselling time, and everybody involved profits from it.

We should also mention that we transfer the data from your clients’ custom designed mounts directly to your cutting-plotter, which saves you even more time and avoids data-entry errors.

As a further note:

If we return to our example of the mount with 20 openings, and factor in both counselling and production, the total time needed for this job is 4 hours.

Using our software and a CMC, it can be reduced to 2 minutes!

On the one hand, these calculations are somewhat theoretical, because the average order is not a mount with 20 openings. On the other hand, you’ll be surprised how many orders like this you will receive per year once you start offering your customers an easy-to-use graphical online environment to design their custom multiple-opening mounts. Simply try it out yourself on PPWRD’s website under Custom Multiple Openings.