Alain Albert, Product Development and CNC Specialist (Canada)

Alain Albert is a pretty damn impressive guy I’ve had the pleasure of spending quite a bit of time with, his enthusiasm for the CNC and woodworking industry is contageous and we have quite a bit in common so we never seem to run out of things to talk about. He’s also the founder of WISNet.ca which is one of the few clubs that I’m a member of that I will actually drop out of meets or conferences to attend! It’s so rare to be able to network with people from the CNC and woodworking industry (you’ll read why in the interview), the conversations are eduational and relevant.

If you can make it to a meetup, I can’t recommend it enough, head over to http://wisnet.ca to register and bring some friends along.

You went to the University of Waterloo in Architecture, how did your education influence the path you took after and did you find your path in the woodworking industry. Did you have a similar road to myself with no job prospects (having to create your own opportunities) or were people lining-up to hire you once you left university?

At 17, I chose a university program with no guidance and no clue about what I wanted to do with my life. I was always extremely curious, an enthusiastic learner, very creative and a hands on problem solver in my youth. I had good marks in school so when it came time to choose a program, I picked Architecture which seemed to have all the right qualities to fit my personality. The U of W was far away from home which was a bonus for me at that point in my life. In school, I learned a lot about art and culture and how to conceptualize an idea and present it and communicate it to other people.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the financial resources available to finish my degree and by the third year I was also becoming disillusioned with the profession. To make things worse, finding a job in architecture in the mid-eighties when mortgage rates were in the double digits was a bit difficult.

I learned how to work with computers and quickly made a name for myself as a CAD expert when CAD was just taking off. I worked on some great projects with different architectural firms in Montreal for many years.

What fascinated you about the world of architecture, your major and the woodworking industry in general?

What fascinated me about architecture was the art of design, telling a story by building something. I quickly found out that there were many other ways for me to express myself. Industrial design and more specifically furniture design quickly became my calling. I was doing some CAD consulting, moonlighting as a contractor doing renovations for people and working with local furniture manufacturers designing their new collections.

In 1992, there was a national competition to design the furniture for the Casino de Montreal and two of my creations won a first prize and were built for the Casino. After that, I won a few other competitions and designed furniture for a gang of manufacturers. I call them a “gang” because the one thing they all had in common was that they didn’t respect the contracts that we had and as soon as the products I designed started selling well, they thought the designer was making too much money and stopped paying their royalties. For this reason, I went on to start my own manufacturing company and grew it to just over a million in sales with seven workers when I bought my first CNC router back in 1995. I ended up selling out of that business and moving out west where I worked in different operations management jobs until I was recruited by FPInnovations to become part of their Industry Advisor team.

How have production methods and technologies changed since you were a production supervisor at StorkCraft Baby over a decade ago?

I have been working in the design and manufacturing of various products made of wood, glass, plastic and steel for nearly 3 decades. I was always at the forefront of new technological changes with the work I did with CAD/CAM and CNC. I have seen tremendous changes in our industry during this time but mostly, I have been amazed at the amount of resistance that the members of our industry put up with this change.

I still see change all around me every day and the incredible potential that it brings. There is so much to do now with robotics, customization, co-creation, distributed manufacturing and all sorts of new social business models.

These days, the market is changing so fast, growth is not going to be found by sticking to traditional business models but by inventing new ones. In the words of an IBM executive from the 80’s, “the most effective way to manage change is to create it”.

One of the main reasons companies are struggling these days is because they don’t embrace change quickly enough. They become complacent, struggle to cheapen their products, move production offshore and then become obsolete. Our industry is not dying, it is changing and we’re not alone; so many industries are experiencing the same pains as we are.

Alain third from the left, I’m first.

Can you describe what kind of solutions you provide customers over at FPInnovations? What are some common production problems companies have and how do you go about solving them?

The interesting thing about the Industry Advisor program at FPInnovations (https://fpinnovations.ca) is that we’re a group of highly skilled and specialized individuals with lots of experience in their respective fields. Also, we’re not limited to a specific mechanism and when we visit a new manufacturer, we can look at all the different aspects of the business and the specific needs and wants of the business owner and propose many different solutions. Our services can vary from giving advice and mentoring, helping with plant layouts, troubleshooting, implementing training programs, or helping with continuous improvement. Because of my background, I tend to help people with product development or CNC work. I also do a lot of vacuum problems diagnostics. We put together seminars and webinars and publish books, articles and papers on different subjects. My book “Understanding CNC Routers” published in 2007 is now the standard text book in many high school and college CNC courses.

What is it about CNC production methods that fascinates you even to this day after over 25 years of experience in the field? What are your general views on where the industry is headed and do you think that traditional woodworking methods are being replaced (and lost) thanks to the incredible production, accuracy and efficiency they provide companies across the wood services field.

There is a lot of talk these days on blogs and online forums about losing traditions in the woodworking sector which I find to be complete nonsense. We’re not losing old traditions but we’re creating new ones. The stale old ways of doing things are weeding themselves out naturally. This is not going to be a very popular point of view but the internet is full of all sorts of creative new ways of making things such as using computers, CNC, laser cutting and 3D printing to shape new objects out of wood that would never have been possible in the past even by the most skillful artisans.

One could argue until they are blue in the face about how we’ve lost the ability to take notice of our surroundings and our connection to nature but it won’t make me give up my car to go back to riding a horse. Sure, the art of making horseshoes is dying but we’re not worse off for it.

Can you give additional details about WISnet such as why you founded it, where you see it going and the challenges you’ve experienced so far? How has the entire experience been so far?

I moved to southern Ontario 3 years ago and started visiting factories here hoping to make myself useful and help companies with their most pressing challenges. I was ill prepared for the less than lukewarm reception that I got. No matter the approach, hosting seminars or preparing workshops or by visiting shop owners out of the blue, very few people were opening their doors and letting me in. It’s not because my services were too expensive, most of what I do is paid for through funding proposals submitted to the province of Ontario and a couple of federal agencies and therefore free or heavily subsidised for the end user.

I found also that the wood manufacturing industry in Ontario is fragmented; everyone is working in a silo and there is almost no collaboration or synergy happening. Businesses don’t belong to their industry associations, they don’t participate in very many collective activities and invariably they all suffer for it. The best example of this is that in the recent negotiations for free trade with the European Union, no one from the wood sector was at the table except for the pulp and paper industry.

I founded WISnet as an experiment to see if we could connect with some of the forward thinkers and innovators in our industry. These are the kind of people that are most likely to make change happen. It’s been a difficult process but we’re starting to see some traction.

I’m still not sure what the end result will be but the idea is that WISnet is a platform for new ideas to germinate and synergies to be made. We will be strong again if we put our heads together and if we care enough about our livelihoods to do something about it. The monthly meetings will be free and open to all with no sales pitch and no ulterior motive until January at which point we’ll take note and decide whether or not to keep doing them.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Yes, it’s really important that we take steps to make our industry strong again. We have the natural resources here, a huge market in North America and the knowledge handed down from generations of woodworkers in the past. We have to do something to make our industry innovative and appealing to new generations of makers and doers. We have to do something to make our occupations profitable again. The first step is to connect with each other and start a dialogue.

Please join WISnet today; visit our website at http://wisnet.ca or on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter and bring friends with you to the monthly Meetup in Burlington and help us spread the word.