“Choose the original – choose success!”
A phrase that we hear and read more and more often. A slogan that the woodworking industry is getting to know, proving that the direction we have taken, the practices we have adopted, are the right ones. This is not satisfaction for its own sake, it goes beyond the pleasure of seeing a campaign that has achieved its goals. The stakes are very high, involving quality, safety, knowledge and experience… all these concepts represent the key values that build up the foundations of the offer by European manufacturers of woodworking technology to the whole world. During difficult economic periods like this, the meaning of these concepts may be lessened: maybe unawares, it may be convenient not to catch the real and full meaning of these words.
When
Eumabois – the European federation grouping the leading national Associations representing the manufacturers of machines and accessories for woodworking – decided to launch the campaign
“Choose the original – choose success” (
www.eumabois.com), probably they did not imagine the impact it would have. When equipment demand collapses, when manufacturing becomes a tougher and tougher challenge, the temptation to “take shortcuts” can be very strong. Shrinking orders and falling operating margins may push even attentive and forward-looking entrepreneurs to underestimate the “worlds” represented by the seven keywords selected by Eumabois to sum up the real value of the work of its members: quality, hi-tech, know-how, reliability, safety, efficiency and experience.
The mix of these “ingredients” is the key that opens the doors to industrial systems that – thanks to the benefits offered by European technology – soon turn out to be much more competitive than their best copy.
Know-how, the capacity to do something. A word with an important meaning, which immediately separates those who can use it from those who cannot. If you “know how”, it means you have understood a problem, a situation. It means you know how to handle that problem and to develop tools that can help achieve new results. Know-how is a challenge to yourself, facing entrepreneurs who need a solution, a machine, a plant that enable them to deliver good products, as quickly as possible, with the strongest esthetic and formal appeal, with industrial costs that can increase their competitiveness.
If you want to give an answer to all of these problems, you must know how. You must know that the product you are going to build is not just a machine, it is the sum of all your knowledge, acquired experience, problems you have already solved successfully and problems – hopefully few – you were not able to solve.
When a customer chooses a machine or a plant, he chooses a complex solution, resulting from the manufacturer’s know-how, the experience of his engineers, technicians and workers. Know-how is generated and grows together with the skills of each person, each employee, each worker. The know-how of a company is the sum of the know-how of all its members; a huge heritage that – just because it results from the experience of many – can “feed itself”, multiply and reproduce.
No product will ever be exactly identical to a product that someone else has invented. There is no product that you can copy “as is”, without knowing what it’s all about. If a machine is the reproduction of a copied project, a bunch of parts you have seen here and there, it will not provide enduring benefits. Technology has a primary goal: increasing the competitiveness of those who choose it. Because it offers higher speed, better quality or a finishing quality that strikes the attention of the final consumer. Because it gives shape to the ideas of a designer, a creator, who can see his concepts take up a shape and turn into reality.
And furthermore, this technology will be the more innovative – as the sum and the synthesis of the widest possible range of experience, capacity and knowledge (in one word: know how!) – the better it meets the expectations of those who have selected it.
Today, everything seems to follow strange, peculiar directions. It seems you can even make decisions that you would be really happy to avoid. However, those who have tried to replace original technology, based on authentic know-how, with only seemingly similar alternatives, have soon realized that market leaders, those who are celebrated around the world for their qualities – and therefore are selected by the best companies – are still one step ahead and keep giving more to an increasingly difficult market. And, let us repeat it, European technology manufacturers are definitely among these.