The impressive Quick Fit Visual Design Tool's user-friendliness and elegance was clearly evident
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We spoke with Lee Darby, Nordfab UK Regional Sales Manager about the company’s current position in the very competitive ducting arena, and also what news and ideas he could offer for customers looking to invest in an extraction system.
What’s the company’s position in the market and what the outlook is moving forward?
"Over the last 18 months, Nordfab as a company in the UK has gone from strength to strength. We’ve enjoyed solid growth of 58% from 2021 to 2022. A key part of that was a substantial kitchen manufacturer project which – but discounting that, we were very close to the previous year’s performance for base business, so we feel we’ve got a little bit more market share.
"We are a relatively young company and we are developing at a healthy and sustainable pace at the moment. Whilst not being complacent, we’ve got a good number of projects coming up so we are not seeing any decline or any issues with Brexit at the moment. So yeah, everything’s really positive at the minute.
Nordfab UK Regional Sales Manager Lee Darby, thrid right, with the Nordfab team at Ligna
What supports that market confidence?
"One of our company’s mantras is that we should be ‘fast, friendly and reliable’ – I have been in sales for over 10 years and I think you learn a lot in that time. So it’s about listening to customers’ needs, reacting and being proactive, innovative, and thinking of new ideas – we’re always thinking of ways to make profitable ideas and concepts for Nordfab’s customers.
"In my opinion," said Lee, "building up relationships is done more by actions than words, so we implement what we’re telling customers and when we say we’re going to deliver this, we follow through. But sales tools are a big part of that as well and in that regard, Nordfab is well-resourced. For instance, we have online quoting tools where customers can generate their own quotation, and because that doesn’t impact our internal resources as much, we can keep our operating costs lower than they might otherwise be, and our customers will benefit from that.
What do Nordfab’s online quoting tools mean for customers?
"We typically deal with people who know what they’re doing in terms of understanding what they are looking for, and how they want it to work – usually, they’ve got hands-on experience. A lot of the larger suppliers want to deal with a manufacturer direct so we can speed the process quite a bit using this system. We’re certainly finding that these online quoting tools have helped us free up some time and create additional efficiencies.
Peter Aberg, MD Nordfab Europe
"We have recently introduced a new 3D design tool called the Quick Fit Visual Design Tool. This is available now for all of our buying customers in the UK and in the EU," explained Lee. "In simple terms, a customer makes a drawing and takes a PNG image file to it and uploads it to the webpage. Then customers select the flow speed, and then you can start to build the entire system."
"You just draw the lines using a mouse and then press the 3D button, and you see it your drawing visualised in 3D in one minute. Then everything is calculated – entire bondings, air pressure losses, clamps, hangers and that’s all directly fed into our system to create a bill of materials before an order. It’s an amazing advantage for our customers to conceive, visualise and create a 3D plan for their ducting, saving time in the process.
"You don’t have to have any AutoCAD experience, it creates pressure drops in the system, and it then gives you a bill of materials that feeds the information to our online quoting tool. So within 10-15 minutes customers can have a fully-detailed ducting quote in 3D. The Quick Fit Visual Design Tool is a game-changer and it’s available for all of our buying customers in the UK and in the EU.
