Interview with Jean-Louis VAXELAIRE, president of Graniterie Petitjean in La Bresse and Laurent FLEURETTE, director of the funeral business of Graniterie Petitjean and of the company's digital development.

What does the Graniterie Petitjean do?

Jean-Louis VAXELAIRE

Graniterie Petitjean is a century-old company whose main objective is the extraction and transformation of Vosges granite. The extraction to make funeral monuments historically but also kerbstones. We have 80 employees and we currently have a turnover of 8 million euros for these markets.

Why did you choose Thibaut for your 5-axis machining centres?

Laurent FLEURETTE

Our collaboration with Thibaut dates back to the beginning of Petitjean. What attracts us to Thibaut machines is the competence for quality polishing, it is the performance of the machines, it is the Thibaut service when spare parts are needed, we can still find parts after 30 years to service our machines. What is also very interesting is the level of service within the research and development team, speaking only of the purchase of the latest T858 machines, we needed to develop these machines more specifically for the adaptation of our funeral production. Thibaut was there for us.

We chose the T858 because it's a CNC machine capable of carrying out all the tasks which reduce a lot of the manual work and more specifically transfer the work to the different areas. When choosing our investment we decided to purchase two machines because they carry out a totally different process in terms of production. A single machine would not have been enough to really change the production.

The advantages of the T858 5-axis machining centre for the monument industry?

These machines have the advantage of having large production capacities which allow us to pass several pieces at the same time. To optimize the machining, we monitor the production by a computer which optimizes the installation of the pieces and programming time so that the machine runs at its maximum. We are also in collaboration with the development team at Thibaut to best optimize the tools in the shortest possible machining time. Currently, we produce on average twenty pieces per day and I can testify that we were amongst the first customers of Thibaut company.