Cabinet hardware expert Titus has launched a new service dedicated to helping manufacturers of ready-to-assemble (RTA) furniture make their products faster and easier to assemble, thereby enhancing customer perceptions and boosting sales.
The groundbreaking Titus CAF Service uses a simple formula, developed after painstaking research by Titus, to assign a Consumer Assembly Friendliness (CAF) score to items of furniture. This not only allows ease of assembly to be accurately quantified, but also reveals areas where improvements can be made, often at little or no cost to the furniture manufacturer.
“RTA furniture has a lot to recommend it, but it suffers from having a reputation for being difficult and time-consuming to assemble, which undoubtedly holds back sales,” says Gary McMahon of Titus.
“Our CAF Service has been specifically developed to help furniture manufacturers overcome this problem, thereby upgrading the public perception of RTA and allowing sales of them to grow to reach their full potential.”
The Titus CAF Score takes into account the total number of parts needed to assemble an item, the number of actions it takes to assemble the parts, and the number of different types of parts. Scores can be produced for complete items of furniture, for sub-assemblies and even components themselves, allowing simplicity of assembly to be examined at every level.
The new Titus CAF Service will help furniture manufacturers to calculate the scores for their own products, or even calculate scores on behalf of the manufacturer. In either case, the service will also provide detailed recommendations for improvement.
A typical recommendation might be to replace a conventional dowel-and-cam connection with a single-part integrated connector. This would reduce the number of types of parts needed and also the number of actions needed to assemble the parts – and this small change would provide a significant reduction in the CAF Score.
Titus is offering its new CAF Service to all manufacturers of RTA furniture, whether or not they are existing users of Titus products.
Further information about the service, including a detailed explanation of the CAF scoring process, can be found on the company’s website.
