There isn’t much left to say when numbers say it all for the furniture manufacturers. FIRA’s annual reviews for the year 2016–2017 shows that UK furniture manufacturing grew to £8 billion pounds in 2015, 7.1% higher than the previous year. But alongside production, furniture manufacturers and customers have also shown a keen interest in getting their finished products with shorter design cycle times, and designs too; are becoming increasingly complex. Today’s designers no longer look at furniture as a piece of box metal or wood.
Customers are spending generously; and that leaves designers and manufacturers with no choice but deliver quality. While the industry has adopted CAD for accuracy in designing and fabrication, we bring you an excellent comparison of CAD software from our experiences.
# 1: Requirement type: Universal yet complex furniture designing
While SolidWorks is the most widely used CAD interface for furniture modeling because of its allowance for easy design progression and generative designs, we at times overlook the benefits of other CAD platforms like AutoCAD.
AutoCAD, is amongst some of those CAD platforms that are versatile even today, and the oldest in terms of being accepted by industry amongst those currently that are popular. It allows designing complex furniture designs in many forms than most others in its competition.
The versatility of AutoCAD is that it allows preparing the drafting concept in a single layout, whereas in SolidWorks you need to prepare concepts, part by part, before the furniture designer can literally go to assembly mode. The only drawback with AutoCAD is that it becomes a little difficult to avail automated preparation of information for furniture production. The process is usually time-consuming.
Because of such shortcomings, newer CAD interfaces have been developed by their own set of design intelligence. These CAD platforms offer considerable amount of design automation, but simultaneously it reduces the software’s flexibility and allowance to generate more complex designs. Also, since they are based on a template design, it demands specialized skills from the user in order to navigate around in-built function.
This means additional time and costs for furniture manufacturers, increased engineering lead time and also the loss of order in some cases. However, the accuracy in design drafts, BOMs, and ability to be compatible with NC machines is excellent and saves manufacturers a great deal of time by increasing quality.
# 2: Requirement type: BTO requirements
It is quite a common that furniture manufacturing requirements are becoming bespoke and manufacturers, too, find it easier than to store and manage inventory. The entire industry of furniture manufacturing is shifting from ‘push’ type to ‘pull’ or ‘Just-in-Time’ kind of industry. The only challenge the manufacturers face in practicing BTO is their struggle to meet deadlines for fabrication drawing generation and production after the order is placed.
However, CAD has its own way of addressing this challenge. Though there are plenty of design tools available, their standalone design automation capability isn’t sufficient. Eliminating repetitive tasks becomes a fundamental requirement for BTO and custom manufacturers. To enable the customer visualize their final product enhances their buying experience as they can customize their designs the way they want. It gives them a sense of designing their product the way they want; which is lacking in standalone CAD tools or present in very little amount.
SolidWorks with DriveWorks possess these excellent capabilities for design automation. Three modules from DriveWorks — DriveWorks Express, DriveWorks Solo, and DriveWorks Pro — will enhance the works of furniture designer, manufacturer, and customer. Tacton, from a Swedish company, gives an excellent competition to DriveWorks with almost all the same features of training, implementation, support, pricing, deployment etc.
On the other hand, we have Configurator 360 from Autodesk which when used with Inventor iLogic will also give same results as by DriveWorks product configurator. The difference between the two is DriveWorks Pro, for example, handles each model component individually and do not follow any parametric link [top-down or bottom-up approach].
As a result, it is much more user-friendly and doesn’t need much of programming form the user end, but simultaneously it also cannot generate new components and 3D geometry as there is no parametric link available.
Whereas Inventor iLogic needs, though do not have add-on functionalities, is flexible with iParts and Excel for various components. It requires using programing language for developing a logical set of rules to automate design.
# 3: Requirement type: Exclusive woodworking designs
While one thinks of furniture, wood is the first guess as material. For manufacturers working with wood, delivering great final product isn’t as easy as working with sheet metal since it will require excellent surface finish that has to be maneuvered by them by employing the appropriate technique.
Texturing, that adds to the beauty of the product poses as the most complex task for designing and fine manufacturing finish as well. Dealing in CAD for woodworking is another challenge but add-ons have designed their way out for furniture designers.
Woodwork for Autodesk’s Inventor adds almost every single furniture design feature for this mechanical design software from Autodesk. It makes Inventor the most user-friendly; virtually no restriction and comfortable CAD tool to design wooden furniture and other wooden products. It allows the designer to have a design first and not draft which makes it more comfortable for the designer to work with.
With other tools, the design gets so much invested in drafting that the whole point of the aesthetically pleasing design is lost on the way to final product design. SWOOD from EFICAD and SolidWorks is also another excellent product that brings native features of edge banding, grains direction, and laminates.
Also, this plugin of SWOOD will eliminate exporting standard DXF files into larger systems which do not understand machine operations for wood cutting or drilling. It has SWOOD CAM that offers compatibility for the manufacturer to import the drawings and models directly in NC machines for developing G-Codes.
Furniture market is becoming agile
But no matter how many different varieties of tools we introduce in the market, in order to remain efficient and maintain quality, not a single CAD tool can suffice all the requirements. Specific add-ons, mechanical design software and specialized CAD tools with template based designs, and upgradations in them will always be welcomed. Furniture market is becoming agile with each passing day; designers and manufacturers too will have to adopt new technologies to meet the needs of their customer.
Source: https://medium.com/@hitechengineer1/choosing-an-appropriate-cad-tool-for-specific-furniture-design-requirements-131d84049052
