10 tips to speed up your custom lighting project
When you plan to purchase the custom lighting for your projects, do you always have some difficulty meeting the project deadline?
Especially for hotel projects which come to big investment and have a tight schedule for project delivery, obviously, you need to do all you can to deliver all custom lighting fixture in time so to avoid expensive airfreight or a huge fine.
While custom lighting fixtures are always special, as so many different material types involved, and each lighting design is in a different dimension and finishing, the manufacturer need much more communication time with you to ensure the product details. After that, the custom light fixture fabrication will take from 4 to 8 weeks, much longer than the standard lighting fixtures.
In this article, we’re going to show you some tips for shortening leading time in custom lighting projects, including speeding up manufacturing time and delivery to your project site. These practical tips are gathered from our 15-years experience in custom hotel lightings supply.
Still interested? Here are the tips for saving time, as well as money, in your custom lighting projects:
1. Collect all required information for the custom lighting in your project
It is the first stage for proceeding any custom lighting project, this information includes the final lighting design, material, finishing, size and the budget.
This will make sure you can have a quick communication with manufacturers and find the most suitable one to start the works.
If you are the project owner or designer, you can figure out these details easily. If not you need to get in touch with the project owner/designer/consultant for getting these details.
2. Work with a reliable and experienced manufacturer
Your custom lighting manufacturer should be equipped with a technical team and sufficient production facilities, such as laser cutting, automatic welding, recessing, polishing, and hole drilling machine. So the production process would be efficient.
Rich production experience on custom lighting can foresee any manufacturing problems from the initial design stage, they can give you workable suggestions before starting production.
As a good custom light manufacturer, it’s important to have the capability and keep the project deadline in mind throughout the entire production process, and take full responsibility for the in-time delivery with quality products.
3. Ensure effective communication with manufacturer on custom lighting specification
If you can provide the design shop drawings, photos or samples to the custom lighting manufacturer, it will help to explain your design idea clearly for a better understanding of what you need.
For example, different people have very different understanding on the metal finishing such as antique brass or bronze, but if you can provide a metal finishing sample or even a photo, this will clear all the doubt.
4. Quick feedback on factory production shop drawings & samples
Once the factory provides you the production drawings and material samples, check if they are compliant to your original design and specification, then confirm to the factory immediately for starting the production.
If not, you need to communicate with the factory to find out the reason for the difference. Due to the manufacturing or material limitation, in some cases some slight changes become Inevitable, but if this change deforms your original design, you will need to find a solution with the factory at once.
5. Try to avoid mold/tooling development
Mold development will make your leading time much longer. Usually, the procedure of mold development will take 3~4 weeks, such as the glass mold, ceramic mold, and any metal mold.
Also, the cost of new mold can be very expensive in some cases, especially the mold for die-cast aluminum, stainless steel, acrylic and any plastic materials.
The best way is for you to choose a similar design or the existing mold instead of developing the new mold, in case you do have limited time for custom light fixture fabrication.
6. Do the pre-installation inspection for your custom lighting
You should connect with your manufacturer immediately if dissatisfaction happens at any production stage, otherwise much more time will be wasted on reworking after all production finished.
It may be difficult for you to monitor each step of your custom lighting manufacturing, but one most important step to help you saving time and avoid headache reworking is the pre-installation inspection.
Pre-installation inspection means to assemble the rough metal parts before surface finishing arrangement, so to see the overall design, ensuring they are the correct size and rational structure.
If you see any problem in this stage, just rework on it immediately to make it correct. It is essential to do this pre-installation inspection for your custom lighting fixture, especially for the large hotel lobby chandeliers.
7. Look out for the fragile items/parts
If your fragile products or some parts are broken during the transportation or installation, what will you do? Argue with the manufacturer for its responsibility or reorder a new one? Neither. You will lose a lot of time, and replenishment needs long wait and high shipping costs.
To avoid it, you have to notify your manufacturer to prepare the alternative one (1%-3%) to ensure the normal progress, when you place the custom lighting order.
8. Avoid the long holiday
No matter you plan to purchase custom lighting from Europe or China, you’d better avoid the long holiday period. Because a holiday means that you can take a break, so does your manufacturer.
In Europe, many countries take summer vacation in July and August, and have holidays at the end of December and in January because of Christmas and New Year.
For China, Chinese New Year is the time for reunion and family gatherings. During this period, lighting factories usually take a long vacation up to 3 or 4 weeks.
So when plan for your custom lighting project and want to meet the project deadline, remember to check the holiday schedule of the country your manufacturer located.
9.Choose the most suitable delivery way for your project
This is depended on the distance between your manufacturer and your project location. For most cases, your custom lightings are manufactured in China, and your project is located outside of China, some most common delivery way include:
Ocean shipment, undoubtedly, it’s the most economical and slowest delivery way. Within 40-50 days from door to door, the vessel can deliver cargos from China to most countries around the world.
Airfreight delivery is the fastest but most expensive delivery way. The transit time from door to door is 5-12days.
Railway delivery. The China-Europe railway network has radiated to most countries in West Asia, the Middle East and Europe. The travel time from China to most European cities will be 22-30 days door to door.
International road transport. There are highways for cargo delivery to Central, West and South-East Asia, and also to Russia. The delivery time would be faster than by railway, but slower than by airfreight. Also, its price is in middle level between railway and airfreight.
You can use a faster delivery way in order to meet your project deadline, of course, the delivery fee would be higher, you need to balance between the delivery time and cost, so to select the most suitable way.
10.Contact Artdecolite for your lighting project !
Having these 10 practical suggestions, we believe you have had the common key points if you want to save time in your custom lighting projects.
Each custom lighting job needs a close cooperation among the project owner, designer and manufacturer. To receive the satisfied products with the least time, you should pay much attention to any stage in the process.
Finally, I’d like to hear from you. If you still have any question on the ordering of custom lighting for your projects, please connect with us.
Related Article: Custom Lighting: The Ultimate Guide
