"Choose the original" is the slogan of the Eumabois campaign in recent months defending European technology. A phrase that is intended to sum up a series of values, a commitment, a "history". Producing "original" goods, machines, tools and equipment that can respond to very precise needs means giving life to a project, gaining experience, understanding how to resolve a problem.
Proposing solutions, as today's European manufacturers do, that are state of the art means devising, designing and producing advanced, innovative and effective technologies. In other words "high technologies". But what lies behind this often overused definition?
Let's try to describe this concept. High-tech is everything that opens up new paths, it means solutions that by their very nature establish new standards, that allow those who use it to have highly innovative solutions to hand and, as such, that can guarantee that the aim that every business sets itself is achieved: producing more, with an ever higher quality threshold and with maximum attention to costs.
In post-industrial society, in the era of applied information, the definition "high-tech" in the world of wood encapsulates, to all intents and purposes, that which technology has produced over the last twenty years. In the face of ever rarer manual skills, a ever less widespread knowledge of the raw material wood, and growing manpower costs, the most innovative technologies, the "high technologies" have come to the sector's aid. These highly innovative technologies have meant more furniture being manufactured, and ever better wood products being made at a lower price.š Woodworking has moved from the carpenter's bench to numerical controls and the use of the most sophisticated systems for managing tools that transform wood and its wood by-products. As nails and drills work their magic, objects are created that will enrich the quality of life of many people.
High-tech has allowed us to overcome another challenge that seemed impossible: "just in time" production. The advanced technologies that are applied to large equipment and to complex production lines have not led to total mass production or to the end of made-to-measure solutions for individual consumers.
The ability to progress and research new technical and planning solutions have ensured that today there is access to made-to-measure technologies, that can produce, using increasingly automatic means, pieces that are even completely different from each other, one after the other.
The machines, to all intents and purposes, have reached such a high level of sophistication that they can operate as if they actually contained the skill, the know-how, the creativity and the versatility of a craftsman or human being.
But this is not all. High-tech has not only involved large costly equipment. European manufacturers have overcome another important challenge: using advanced solutions to increase the productivity, efficacy and efficiency of each machine, even the most traditional ones. Router planes, band saws, planing machines. Even these basic machines can today be equipped with "high-tech" solutions and controls that make them faster, more reliable and able to remember.
It's a relay race: Advanced technologies are used to make "high-tech" machines, tools and equipment that - in their turn - create "high-tech" products, in the sense that they will be goods and objects that can satisfy ever tougher needs and ever more motivated and demanding consumers.
This cannot be improvised. This is all the result of history, of tradition, of the commitment of an industry that has always tried to achieve its aim in the best way possible. By investing, by researching. By innovating and modernising, transforming itself at the same speed as which the world and society changes. Understanding the new needs, analysing the new possibilities and by identifying the new answers. All this, and much more besides, is what the eight letters "high-tech" mean. It is difficult to copy it. And businessmen all over the world who work with wood and its by-products using European-made technology know this full well.
