In a few words, can you tell us more about your company’s area of expertise?
The DAO Group is a family business that this year celebrates its 20th anniversary. Our experience mainly revolves around three main activities, namely mechanical engineering, design office service provision and construction division.
Specifically, our job consists of designing, drawing and manufacturing all the objects, machines and production tools that surround us. The heart of our business today is based in particular on industrial design, but also on building design, by updating existing plans after readings via 3D scanning or designing new buildings. In this sector, we have been supporting our clients for several years in the implementation of the “BIM” (Building Information Modeling) design process: it involves drawing digital models that contain all the construction information collected from the different professional associations.
Exactly who are the customers targeted by these different types of insights?
The fact of working around three different large poles allows us to collaborate with actors from very varied sectors of activity; within the same division, customers also often come from very different backgrounds.
In the field of provision of services in a mechanical design office, for example, we provide flexibility and skills to our clients by making our draftsmen available within their own design office. We work both with SMEs of 5 to 10 people and with large international groups operating in the automotive, food, agricultural or even aeronautical industries, to name just a few.
In general, as soon as an actor wants to make something, they have to draw it, and we are precisely there to provide the required skills according to their project and specifications.
The DAO Group also has several agencies in France.
In fact, we benefit from a local network with several agencies to be closer to our clients, mainly in the large North-West district: in Angers, Rouen, La Roche/Yon, Le Mans, Rennes or Lille; but also in Canada, in Montreal and Quebec. Our employees present at the DAO Group in France can thus develop in a new environment and work, if they wish, on the other side of the Atlantic during their career within the group.
In general, what are the challenges facing your group today?
There are several important problems today. The perfect knowledge on the part of the manufacturers of their production tools and their infrastructures is one of them. If mechanical engineering and construction were originally two different activities, today there is a tendency to bring these two activities closer together. Having a double competition, customers increasingly ask us to respond to a need for modeling of mechanical equipment for installation within their factory. The DAO Group thus allows its clients to get to know their facilities better in order to optimize their decision-making in matters related to infrastructures.
Can you explain how BIM is also a big challenge in the construction sector?
This represents a real process change in the building sector. By being able to model, report and centralize information on buildings, this process guarantees the correct design of infrastructures, saving time during construction and optimizing building maintenance actions.
In fact, BIM consists of “assembling” a digital model through software, to go from a 2D drawing to a 3D model, where all the actors involved in the construction or renovation of a building insert their elements into this digital model. , so that all site components are referenced there. This makes it very precise to know the location of each element digitally even before the start of the work; It is this element that represents a revolution in the way of working in the construction sector. Therefore, there is a real convergence of these working methods with those applied in mechanical engineering.
This content was produced with SCRIBEO. The BFMBUSINESS editorial team was not involved in the production of this content.
Source: BFM TV
