Comparison: Cutting by Hand vs. the CMC

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.

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. Clicking on this link will open a new window.

• Regarding our example with a single mount, we should add: if the customer is a regular walk-in customer, counselling time will take at least 10 minutes. Using our software will hardly reduce the time in this case, but it will improve the quality of your counselling, and both you and your customer will profit from this. Please read the sections “Visualising and Comparing Proportions” and “Pricing and Price Comparison” under Personal Counselling in Your Shop.

We’ve explained this interesting issue in a very brief manner here. A more detailed description will follow. Please jump to the following sections.

·        Cutting by Hand

·        Cutting with a CMC

Cutting by Hand

To recap: you save about 1 minute per mount when using a CMC, meaning that it takes quite a few mounts before the purchase of a CMC becomes profitable.

It’s not that we want to advise you against buying a CMC – we’d simply like you to take another favourable look at cutting by hand and consider that, in the future, our software will print you a clearly structured order form with verified data that you or your employees can use to set your high quality cutter for each order.

The order form gives you a structured list of the measurements and also shows each mount in diagram form.

For each opening in a multiple-opening mount, you get a separate print with a dimensioned sketch that is drawn to scale. Why not take another look at the multiple-opening mounts that our customers created in the last 30, 60 or 90 days and think about how you would cut them by hand? You will discover that most of these mounts can be cut with a traditional cutter.

If an arrangement is too complicated, you could simply order it from a service provider like PPWRD. Soon, you will be able to transfer the error-free framing data that you or your customers have generated directly to PPWRD at the click of a mouse.

Probably the right way to go in many cases is to cut the more common mounts by hand while ordering from a service provider when you require either mounts in large quantity or mounts with more complicated opening arrangements.

Cutting with a CMC

The question of whether buying a computerized machine is the way to go for you is not simply a matter of the number of mounts you cut each day. It also depends on your personal preferences. We would understand completely if you bought a CMC simply because you were fascinated by the technology! It was one of our reasons ;).

Nevertheless, we would like to advise you not to act too hastily. Ordering a computerized machine will be quickly done if you really need one. All it takes is a phone call.

But the purchase of our software will certainly be a step in the right direction. It takes care of your main concern: it optimises your professional counselling and, with certain customer groups, it drastically reduces the time you spend on counselling. A computer-operated machine can then be the icing on the cake.