SEPTEMBER 2019 FEATURE:

PYTHA 3D CADCAM, an established CADCAM software from Germany, was relatively unknown in South East Asia (SEA) until Aaron Boo and Clement Su, both from Singapore, clinched the sole distributorship in June 2017 to bring PYTHA to SEA.

Within a year and a half, the two young men sealed deals with 65 woodworking companies – 35 companies from Singapore, and 30 from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines and Korea. The speed at which PYTHA is penetrating the market and its success hit-rate is undeniably, and remarkably high.

“Aaron” and “Clement”, as most of their customers call them on their various chat groups – Whataspp in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, Viber in the Philippines, or Zalo in Vietnam—for after sales support, are young, and they are selling PYTHA with a start-up mentality and boundless zeal.

34-year-old Clement has been a woodworking machinery and dust control system supplier since 2010. Aaron, who turns 30 this year, founded a carpentry company four years ago. The workshop leveraged CNC machines and software for production. He had earlier worked at a local panel manufacturing company and was procuring machines for the company when he first met Clement, who happened to be the supplier.

Being equally driven and coupled with strong industry knowledge, Aaron and Clement saw immense potential in using software to help the regional woodworking industry reap huge benefits. Joining hands to build a start-up was only a matter of time.

The PYTHA brand, though, has been around for 36 years, with a strong foothold in the German and Australian market. Founded by husband and wife team, Willy and Uschi Flassig, PYTHA started out as a 3D drawing software to help architects visualise their drawings. It later evolved into the CAD system and was introduced to the woodworking market, adding many woodworking-centric functions and generators on-board the platform.

PYTHA, A NEUTRAL AND HIGHLY VERSATILE CADCAM SOFTWARE

PYTHA is compatible with machines from most of the leading manufacturers. An end-to-end software, it automates the design to production process. It also claims to be the only CADCAM software that is available in multiple languages – Chinese, Korean, Bahasa Indonesia, on top of the standard European languages. Vietnamese and Thai language packs will be available soon.

Being an end-to-end product, flexibility is key and PYTHA aims to fulfil this requirement in every aspect. The software ensures easy drawing even for more complex furniture or customised pieces; price quotations, bill of materials (BOM), cutting optimisation, labelling and estimated manufacturing time can be generated in an instant; manual programming, one of the industry’s greatest pain points, is now a thing of the past as it becomes fully automated, freeing up manpower and time.

While similar CADCAM software in the market target mostly cabinet manufacturers, PYTHA’s flexibility in drawing furniture and more complex customised designs proves to be popular with contract and custom build manufacturers. In fact, PYTHA is excellent in low volume- high mix applications: 60 per cent of their customers are manufacturers providing customised outfitting for shops.

“We have also been getting many enquiries from the solid wood furniture sector, especially contract manufacturers from Vietnam. They find it difficult to convert a drawing into a 3D object,” said Clement.

Getting to meet a high volume of companies and understand their operations over the past two years also helped Aaron and Clement to gain critical insights, and they have been quick to suss out emerging trends while identifying gaps in manufacturing operations and business processes.

MASS PRODUCTION MARKET DECLINING IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

For one, contract manufacturing and custom building is increasingly prevalent in the SEA market.

“In SEA, I think there is a growing number of companies that are producing customised products. The regional market for mass production is declining quite drastically, even in Indonesia, I have seen it for myself in the past seven years, many companies are converting from mass production to customised production. I have customers in Indonesia who used to run three shifts a day for mass production, and now reduced to only one,” said Clement.

This presents a number of challenges, given that many factories own machines but not software.

TIME SPENT ON PROGRAMMING WOODWORKING MACHINES IS GETTING LONGER

The first challenge is that every design needs to be keyed into individual machines, a time-consuming process. As batch orders increase but each order requires less pieces, more designs need to be programmed and the turnover time has inevitably stretched.

Aaron provided a case in point, “One of our customers in Kuala Lumpur manufactures clothes cabinets for H&M. In the past, H&M used to place orders for 10,000 cabinets in one design to be produced and stored in the warehouse. But over the last five years, they have changed their orders to 1,000 cabinets in 10 different designs. So technically, the capacity changed from one to 10 different products.”

A typical manufacturing process at the factory in SEA would see the designer sending over the 3D design, a drafter re-drawing it in 2D, a foreman deciding the position of drill holes and other components, and workers programming the machines before production finally begins.

“10 years ago, this company only needed to programme one file for 10,000 pieces, but now, they have to repeat the process 10 times for the same output. Programming time, in particular, has spiked drastically,” said Aaron.

Nowadays, time spent on programming the machines may even exceed the running time of the machines. “We did our own study which showed that the downtime of the machine is about 50 per cent on average, because of the time needed to programme the machining files,” added Clement.

When PYTHA entered the picture, the shorter production time was apparent as the design to production process was connected and streamlined. A designer’s 3D drawing can now be automatically updated on the 2D technical layout. Without the need to redraw designs, the drafter can now touch up and add technical details quickly — it helped that the software is also easy to use. The drawing can then be outputted to the machines directly using NC codes generated for CNC machines, skipping the step of manual programming and starting production right away.

“Our first customer in Indonesia told us that when they first implemented PYTHA, production capacity went up by about two to three times, because he no longer needed to manually programme every machine. For just one cabinet, there are eight to nine components, which they used to key in manually, it is much easier now,” remarked Clement.

“In high cost markets like Singapore and Malaysia, the owners save on manpower using software but in Indonesia where labour cost is not such a big factor, they save a lot on turnaround time,” he added.

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