Every seat is a different seat
A thousand-seat auditorium is not a thousand identical chairs. FIBROCIT designs an interlocking system of varying designs that answers the shape, size, capacity and acoustics of the specific room, so each chair is custom-built to its position.
If our client would like to adapt the design of the seating, or increase the capacity of their venue mid-way through a project, our designers need to re-draw the designs from scratch.
Benedict GeersOwner, FIBROCITProject management, design and quality control were the three areas holding the company back — and underneath all three sat a paper archive.
Digging out the earlier paper designs for current and historical projects from our physical archives creates a significant amount of time-consuming and expensive manual effort. This approach to archiving also greatly increases the risk of losing intellectual property.
Benedict GeersOwner, FIBROCITWhat we built
A set of applications running on IBM i in the cloud, hosted on a Power S814 — specifically, on the CD-Invest IBM i cloud, which provides secure services to twenty businesses in total. FIBROCIT did not buy a machine; it bought capacity and support.
- An integrated project management and accountancy system, replacing paper-based processes
- An archiving application that captured and stored digital versions of a century of projects — now live
- A 3D configurator, so designs can be built and adapted on three-dimensional photographs of the real space, with augmented reality planned for client previews
- A visual recognition application, to automate the quality control check of finished chairs against the original design
What it changed
Moving from paper to an integrated system in the cloud improved efficiency across the company, and because every project action is tracked and costed against project revenue, FIBROCIT can tell which work is actually profitable.
The archive application means nobody spends days trawling paper records when a project from fifty years ago needs revisiting — and the risk of that history being lost or damaged has gone.
With the innovative potential of IBM i and the expertise of CD Invest, we have modernized our business while retaining our legacy of excellence.
Benedict GeersOwner, FIBROCITThe cloud arrangement also keeps total cost of ownership down — FIBROCIT pays for what it uses, and can scale without disruption. CD-Invest continues to host and support the core applications.
Source: cdinvest.eu portfolio, Fibrocit (2018). All quotations as published. Note: the 3D configurator and visual-recognition work were described as in progress at the time of writing — confirm current status before publishing.