Cadlogic Case Study

Company Overview

Company-A are a successful family run business based in London that design, craft and install luxury wooden items. The company was established more than fourteen years ago, and now have a team of dedicated designers, carpenters and fitters, prioritising innovative design, quality and service.

General Requirement

Company-A required a design solution that could streamline the creation of design and manufacturing drawings, but with sufficient flexibility to cater for the majority of the design variants required for each individual bespoke installation.

Specific Requirements:-

• Speed up Drawing creation
• Automate cutting data information
• Reduce re-input of data to minimise errors

Solution

The brief was to replace the existing AutoCAD based design systems with a bespoke system to automate as much of the design process as possible. After our discussions with Company-A the Cadlogic team devised the concept of the current system.

The key features of the system being:-

• Ability to define the space within which an item will be installed, including more complex spaces such as running around a corner.
• Ability to specify high level properties of an item such as type and layout.
• Automatic generation of all of the main components required to construct the item.

• Ability to add internal objects to the designed items with a simple to use, single click interface.

• Extensive database of domain-specific products such as different types of timber, different lacquers and vinyls and glass types.

• Layout rules such as precise margins between moving components are built into the software, this way designers can create the components and correct margins are maintained automatically.

• View the design in 3d and 2d plan or 2d elevation with all of these views being connected to a single internal model, this way it is possible to add/modify/remove components in one view and the changes are reflected in all other views.

• Animation of moving components for clash detection and to get a feel for what the finished item will be like.

• Ability to export cutting list in the format Company-A used before the software was created, so that downstream processes do not need to change workflow.

• Ability to make the user aware of anything that might be a problem, such as pre-defined distance tolerances, or components that may clash with each other. These rules are displayed as warnings to assist the user, whilst allowing the user to ignore them should they see fit.

Development and Testing

As with all Cadlogic bespoke software systems Company-A were kept up to date with the progress of the development every step of the way. This included demonstrations of functionality at key stages and inviting their input to maximise the fine tuning of the finished system.

Company-A comments

'The system has allowed us to eliminate all of the human error inherent in manually inputting details into a cutting list. Consequently we have been able to deal with the increase in sales this year without employing any additional CAD staff. Looking forward to version 2'!

(Company-A Director.)

The success of the program since the initial version has allowed Company-A to engage Cadlogic to enhance the functionality. Recent additions include:-

• Adding new products, colour, styles etc. to the database of customer options.
• Adjusting Company-A-Specific rules about how components are laid out such as margins and component sizes etc.
• Adding new tools to automatically create and lay out content, for example bespoke sized timbers that wrap around internal sections
• Adding tools to automatically generate dimensions for construction drawings