Furch Guitars (Furch) plans to increase its production by 50% this year. Modern technologies in particular will aid in this, and the company promises further advancement in the already excellent quality of its instruments.
Furch Guitars produces an average of 7,000 acoustic guitars annually, which are subsequently sold worldwide by their authorized dealers. Increasing demand for their products, caused in part by the coronavirus pandemic and partly by more effective marketing and sales activities, has hit the ceiling of the company’s production capacity. Demand has exceeded supply by approximately 90%. The company therefore decided to gradually increase its production by up to half during this year. The company’s production capacity will increase to 10,000 instruments yearly.
Increasing production in and of itself carries with it a number of challenges, according to Petr Furch, CEO of Furch Guitars: “While increasing production, it is extremely important to me that we maintain the existing quality of Furch guitars and, ideally, further it. Thanks to research and the latest production technologies, we can guarantee it.”
Playing central roles in increased production throughput are new employees (15%) and modern technology (35%). Specifically, collaborative robots which allow close teamwork between people and robotic arms without the risk of injury. A major advantage of this technology is also high sensitivity and, thanks to this, it is possible to use robotic arms for very delicate operations.
“Collaborative robotics is an emerging industrial sector, however, I must say that after a year of testing we were able to achieve outstanding results with it. This technology is a perfect fit for our precision manufacturing and was a great addition to the indispensable hand craftsmanship. If more instrument manufacturers would implement this, also low volume manufacturers, there would be more quality instruments available worldwide, which the players certainly deserve,” stated Petr Furch.
Collaborative robots will be part of nine workstations in total, one of which also includes soundboard voicing, where the final sanding was hitherto done manually. “The average variation in accuracy with manual sanding was around 0.005”. Thanks to sensitive robotics we were able to reduce this to 0.002”. This result allows us to further improve the tonal consistency of soundboards in all our instruments, both across series and within each series,” stated Petr Furch, describing the positive effect of new technology on instrument quality.
The company started with preparations for increasing production last year, with full implementation starting in February 2021. Within four months of implementation, they successfully increased their year-to-year production by 30% and expect to reach the targeted 50% by October of this year. Besides production, materials storage has almost doubled; the reasons for which are not only increased production, but also the need to eliminate material and component shortages, which are unfortunately quite common in today’s economic climate.
7-million annual turnover
Increase of production capacity is also evident in the company’s financial results. While in 2019, turnover was 4.3 million dollars, it grew by a third in 2020, reaching 5.6 million. This year, thanks to the planned increase in production, the company is targeting 7.5 million. The turnover also includes the activities of its subsidiary Furch Inc., which Furch founded two years ago in Nashville with the aim of securing wholesale of Furch instruments and thus getting closer to American customers.
