Fancy and durable furniture designing is a need of furniture industry. But we need to ask, do we really need a new chair design? Isn’t there enough variety of chairs manufactured to deliver the comfort to users across geographies, genders, and usage?

The sensible answer to the first question is a ‘no’; while for the later, it obviously becomes a rhetorical question. Unless, of course, the furniture design engineers are designing them with gob-stopping innovative ideas that maintain the efficiency of post designing stages.

One reason of remaining efficient is of course recession; but more than that there is an ‘urgency’ factor for every bespoke job. And what furniture designers, do is just tailor the existing designs to the customer’s need. Such requirements call for design automation solutions that require least possible efforts to the designer and also during post-design stages.

Another good reason to embark on design automation is that there are new retailers emerging each day with a chain of stores with identical infrastructure designs. This only needs distribution of fabrication drawings with designs tweaked according to geographical variation and spatial availability to local manufacturers or assembly drawings to assemblers at designated sites. Design automation takes very good care of handling this entire process and eliminates anything that is unnecessary, time-consuming and repetitive.

Implement design automation & sit back to yearn profits

A prominent food and retail chain metal and wood furniture manufacturer from the USA realized that they needed design automation to eliminate the repetitive jobs, shorten the lead times and boost efficiency, reduce waste and addressing increased volume orders satisfactorily.

With the implementation of DriveWorks alongside SolidWorks, the manufacturer was empowered to fasten their cycle time by 70 times and reduced the engineering lead-time, which ultimately boosted their productivity exponentially. The multitasking process of DriveWorks helped them automate the entire configuration process, documentation and quotation. It eliminated the boring task of CAD modeling and extracting fabrication drawings by tweaking geometrical dimensions for each new order.

This followed an obvious reduction of processing time from 4-5 days to one day and generated sales and revenue. It accompanied a faster response to every inquiry places and also developed better insights as to forecasting near the accurate value of sales. Once design automation was in place, making profits wasn’t a job, they were meant to occur.

A moment of realization through analysis of design process

It was only a matter of time that this USA based manufacturer realized that their retail store furniture needed a specific set of furniture and new designs didn’t matter. They were just wrongly dedicating their time to repetitive processes like generating BOQs and work orders which resulted in an elongated process to put them off the competitive international markets.

To implement DriveWorks it is essential to know your business and know the process of designing, modeling, and drafting. It will not only speed up the design cycle time but also deliver specification flow and create enhancing the buying experience for customers as well as sellers. Once the basic templates are developed only customizing them as per the clients’ exact requirement remains to be adjusted which is also nothing more than populating the data in the configurator.

Set your parameters straight

Once you’ve figured that design automation is the solution suitable for your design process, feeding the parameters to the configurator and developed a logical set of rules is the only thing that needs to be taken care of before profits knock your door. It requires capturing of parameters to set the cap and bottom values of permissible design values for specifying custom products to let the user design their bespoke product.

As and when specifications are entered the logical set of rules will know the permissible values and separate it from null or errors and process the information for the further downstream process of manufacturing. Document generation, 3D CAD models, quotes, work orders, pricing etc. are automated. Even number of parts to be manufactured can be calculated if design automation software is linked with the inventory management software and PDM.

Be minimalist for efforts and go unrestrained when it’s about profits

The hitch is that ‘Manufacturers manufacture products with a fair share of profit’ is a traditional concept. For today’s market, new forte is to add maximum profits with least possible efforts. Even though the furniture market is large, designs aren’t really new, except for surface finish or texture. Design automation will only help furniture manufacturers to bring furniture products faster to their customers.