Fact: the ultimate aim of specialised steel detailing software is to increase a company's bottom line profit. This applies to large steel fabrication businesses, steel engineering companies and even self employed steel detailers. But when a business has run successfully for many years it begs a question to many business owners, why should they invest money in additional technology?

Many companies (and this does not only apply to steel fabrication companies) have reached their own status quo through careful development of their internal process over many years, so it is perfectly understandable and not unusual for the business to be on an even keel, that is to say very comfortable with it's current practices and fairly unaware of what could possibly be done to make further improvements.

The recent dip in the economy has not helped in this regard either. Low points in the natural cycle of an economy have resulted in companies battening down the hatches. But in reality this is the ideal time to be investing and improving internal systems as competition is fiercer than usual and traditional margins are also being squeezed.

So any potential competitive advantage needs to be pursued in order for a business to survive profitably and equally to prosper even in a competitive market.

One key question to ask here is when was the last time you reviewed your companies own internal processes and investigated technology that could help your business improve? If the answer is more than a year or two then it is fair to say that you are already dropping behind your competitors. If it is any longer then you will have may have a serious amount of catching up to do!

Low points in productivity can readily be seen as opportunities for forward thinking business owners (many of which may have downsized their operations) as they recognise that these slack periods of activity can be used to invest and the spare time can be leveraged in order to both learn and roll out more productive practices that allow them to increase capacity with a much leaner workforce.

So let's look at just a small selection of some of the typical business benefits of investing in steel detailing and design technology, and ask some difficult but very pertinent and candid questions.

Business Benefits And Profit Opportunities

Improved tender win ratio - Additional revenue generated from extra won projects during the financial year go straight on the bottom line. The industry reports a large increase in tender activity so are your tenders as accurate and presentable as possible in order to win more business, or are you struggling to complete tenders in a timely manner and seeing your win ratio fall?

Reduction of initial design and detailing time. - This is proven to help a business not only decrease costs but also increase both productivity and capacity. Is your design or drawing office working as efficiently as possible or is it causing a bottle neck resulting in wasted workshop time and low workshop productivity.

Reduction of labour costs - The reduction of costs due to errors (reported to management or not) in the workshop and avoidable rework on site during the project delivery phase equate to additional profit per project. Does your business have a tight control over rework costs and the reduction of errors or do you have to build in a large percentage during estimating to compensate (which could potentially make you uncompetitive)?

Reduction of costs due to client led project changes. - Project changes are one of the biggest areas of project loss and contract creep. Can your design or drawing office automatically update drawings in the event of project changes, or are they wasting weeks per projects having to manually find, check and change each drawing individually.

The above only outlines some of the business benefits and profit opportunities that investment in software technologies have been proven to bring and it is long since a question of does this technology work or will it work for my business? But more of a question of why has this technology not been implemented in my business already?

If your design team have not highlighted to you the advantages of steel engineering and steel detailing software already then this should be pushed high on your priority list as you will be without question bleeding profitability.