4 signs you should upgrade your furniture design software
Lots of woodworkers love their tools, which they use for the design of furniture. They are comfortable using it, they know how it works and they know the flaws software has and workarounds to correct those flaws. What else would you need, right? Well, that is not the way anymore. Although your software doe’s whatever it suppose to do, that doesn’t mean the same job couldn’t be done better, faster, easier. Just imagine if there would be a machine, which could transport you from one place to another in seconds. You could move from home to work and backward, to shop, to pick up kids from school in seconds. Would you still want to go back to your car and spend hours in traffic jams, instead of dedicating this time for family, work or just yourself? Not so much, ha? The same rule works for design software, while the old ways still work – it’s not the best anymore. So check out these 4 signs and decide if it’s time for you to upgrade your furniture design software:
Constant delays
Do you feel like more often than not you have to solve problems related to production delivery terms? While there might be lots of reasons why this happens, our experience shows, that usually, issues lie within design workflow processes. Workers struggle to deliver necessary information on time and the whole process mess up.
Unsatisfied workers
Once again, there might be 100 reasons, why your worker seems to be unhappy (family issues, financial difficulties, etc.) But if you see, that “Overworked” is written all over his face, he spends extra hours in the office to complete tasks and barely has free time on weekends, the problem might be the tools that he uses. As our studies show – about 60% time of the design process the designer spends preparing information for manufacturing, and just 40% creating the actual design. This information preparation task is very tiring, boring and usually seems meaningless. Wouldn’t it be better if the employee could dedicate this time to design improvement?
Lots of spoilage
How usually do you have to deal with spoiled furniture, because there was a mistake in calculations? If that’s the pretty painful question for you, you should look into the way how those calculations are done and delivered. Doe’s Joe from the design department enter hundreds of counts by hands? Well, in this case, there’s no surprise, that instead of a beautiful chair, you get an unusable piece of furniture.
Many different tools
Take a good look at your design process and count how many tools your workers use. I bet there’s quite a few. Typically companies use AutoCAD or similar software for design, Excel for BOM (Bill of material) and some manually programmed front-end system for CNC machine. When there are so many tools, the preparation and transmission of information become a difficult task. Moreover, it’s one of the ways for mistakes to slither in unnoticed until it’s too late.
All these signs lead to one conclusion – a low level of automation. All the above-mentioned problems rise because processes include manual work. Just imagine, how much better the workflows would become if those processes would be automatic? Well, if it’s hard for you, we can prompt that the information preparation time for manufacturing could be 50% shorter, there could be up to 95% fewer mistakes, and effective CNC machine work time could be increased by 40%. Pretty impressive, ha? Therefore, we encourage you to try and figure out your pain-points and look for solutions, which meets your need best!
