Cubicle Centre are a building product manufacturer, we manufacture toilet cubicles and washroom
panel systems. The company formed in 1999. We’re based
in West Yorkshire, we have been since then. We’re an SME. We've got 25 staff in total
and an annual turnover of £4M. Short lead times are the key to our business
and one of the reasons we win most contracts. Keeping them low enables increased capacity,
efficiency and productivity. BIM first came to my attention really from
a marketing angle. We got an email from BIMStore. The fancy ‘3D visuals’ stood out to me,
but I quickly learnt that there was a lot more to BIM and the benefits were there for
us internally, as well as externally. We quickly realised that BIM could help improve
our working processes; we could use BIM workflows to streamline our office-based side of production,
which in-turn would help improve the entire business as a whole.
So for Cubicle Centre BIM was all about improving the speed of the production process, we had
a bit of a bottleneck when it came to the office side of production, where the factory
were waiting for jobs to come through. Integrating BIM into that office-based process is speeding
things up, ensuring we get jobs through to the factory quicker and keeping our lead times short.
BIM has influenced every part of the business
here at Cubicle Centre. We make a point of keeping everyone in-the-loop at Cubicle Centre
about what BIM means to us as a company, how it influences their job role, and how that’s
affecting us in the factory.
The way I approached BIM with the owners of
the business was purely from an internal angle, so BIM for Cubicle Centre has been first and
foremost about improving our processes and us as a company.
With that in mind, I’ve had the owners on board since day one, we’ve had a shared
vision about improving the company, so the investment has been a lot easier for us to
handle as a small business. BIM allowed us to improve our production times
and increase turnover, so effectively it was a no brainer.
Typical lead times at the moment are between 10-15 working days. We estimate – after
we’ve introduced BIM fully – that this will reduced to 10 working days.
Well so far we’re towards the end of our development stage, but we are working towards
a projected five working week saving by implementing BIM into the production side of our business.
We didn’t invest in BIM just for the sake of doing it, it’s always been about improving
ourselves, and as a small company making that investment it had to pay-off and improving
ourselves ensured that that was the case. Well how we used to work is we used to draw
all production drawings by hand and add the dimensions on to make sure they would work,
not always to scale. Now we do it all in Revit, which is our software
of choice, so when you click one of our components and put it into a project that will generate
not only its 3D model but its works order, its cutting list, at the same time. So that
cutting list then gets printed off with the drawing sheet and can go straight to the factory.
Whereas with the old way we used to draw-it and then duplicate that information, onto
a cutting list. As you enter our components into a live project,
in-house we’ll have templates that not only have our drawing sheets but also have our
works order sheets. As you drop each component in, it will populate the information from
each component into a cutting sheet. So partition length, plaster width, heights of doors and
so on. The beauty of it is because you can see multiple
views each time of the same component, you can check for errors as you’re working and
because it’s completely to scale, no matter what size you look at it, if it doesn’t
fit, you can see it doesn’t fit and you can amend it accordingly which means errors
on the actual duplicated information side – the works order side – should be completely
cut out by that process. BIM is paying off for us as a company. What
BIM has done is led a shift to digital, not just in production but across the whole business
especially in terms of marketing. To enable us to invest in BIM we reduced our
print based budget for things like literature, advertising and building product directories.
So the savings we’ve made from those print-based items allowed us to move into a ‘digital
era’ really. Other returns on investment we have seen include
becoming the manufacturer of choice, in addition to that we won ‘SME of the Year’ at the
recent Constructing Excellence Awards for our work with BIM.
Well the next step for us is to train the rest of our production staff to be able to
use our software and new methods, and roll that out company wide.
If I were to give advice to other manufacturers looking to adopt BIM it would be first and
foremost to look at your internal processes and how you handle your product data.
For me that’s what BIM is all about; it’s just a better way, a quicker way, a more digital
way of handling your product data so look at your internal processes first and foremost.
We have a little saying “it’s about working smarter, not harder”.