Imagine that your steel fabrication company needs to subcontract detailers for a project. While perusing online job boards and websites that advertise freelancers and foreign companies, you find a reasonably priced detailer, perhaps from overseas. It looks like a great deal, so you bring them on to the project. After they finish the work, you make a dreaded discovery: they’ve done the work incorrectly, and it doesn’t even meet your country’s standards.
It turns out that the detailers you hired weren’t a legitimate company and they were using unlicensed copies of Tekla Structures. While they might have had some legal licenses for appearances, the rest were pirated. Their detailers were not properly trained, or familiar with your country’s standards even if they claimed they were. As a result, you have to hire a second company to redo the detailing work, and not just refabricate all the previously fabricated pieces, but hire additional fabrication resources to make up for lost time. Your project is now behind schedule and bleeding more and more money every day.
An expensive lesson
For many companies – even the law-abiding, license-holding ones like yours – this nightmare can easily become reality. One unlucky customer recently experienced this exact scenario when hiring extra hands for a tight-schedule job, and suffered its devastating results firsthand. The work they received from the subcontracted steel detailer was done incorrectly and didn’t meet the country’s standards, meaning they had to hire new detailers, have all of the previously fabricated pieces refabricated, and pay for extra fabrication resources to ensure all pieces were finished on time. Because they were behind schedule, they also had to deal with the snowballing daily costs. On top of all that, the detailer cost our customer more than 11.000 euros in on-site rework alone,– and because the detailers didn’t actually have insurance, our customer was unable to recover any of the costs. Trying to save money by using a suspiciously inexpensive detailing company ended up costing them a huge chunk of cash, as well as lost time, lost materials and a damaged reputation. It was undoubtedly an expensive lesson.