It is safe to say that design changes are an integral part of the furniture construction process. On one hand, this is due to the nature of the process, which is particularly evident in the design of more complex furniture. Before the design can fully align with the designer’s ultimate vision, it is often necessary to implement various modifications and create multiple design iterations. On the other hand, during the course of a project, circumstances frequently arise that require adjustments to the furniture design. Challenges such as alterations in room dimensions due to construction, shifts in the customer’s preferences, delays in the delivery of ordered materials from suppliers, and so on, are commonplace occurrences for furniture manufacturers. Manufacturers must react and adapt, necessitating changes to the furniture model itself and the regeneration of all the production-related information.

The consequences of this process are significant. Unless the design system incorporates automated and flexible modification mechanisms, making adjustments to the design can be time-consuming and demanding. Designers find themselves investing valuable time in non-creative tasks, and since these changes demand careful attention, they can lead to errors due to human fatigue.

Woodwork for Inventor, thanks to features such as parametric and skeleton design, as well as the ability to reshape cut points, enables the creation of models that permit the comprehensive modification of the entire structure without the need to redesign each individual part or joint. This liberates designers from the laborious process of ‘reassembling’ the entire model piece by piece. Additionally, through automated documentation generation, designers can obtain drawings, specifications, and CNC programs from this modified model with a simple click. These two mechanisms dramatically save designers’ time and liberate them from tedious and demanding procedures, allowing them to focus on truly creative work.

As an illustrative example, consider a company tasked with designing a commercial island for a client—a complex structure comprising panels, metal, and glass, consisting of several thousand parts. Just days before commencing production, the client urgently requested that the entire structure be lowered by 5 centimeters. Since the client was accustomed to using AutoCAD, they anticipated that redesigning such a model, comprising thousands of parts, and creating new documentation would take at least a couple of weeks. With Woodwork, the process involved dismantling the structure in just 5 minutes and generating the necessary documentation within half an hour.”