Accelerated millwork drafting by 30-40% using SWOOD add-ins for SolidWorks

Mechanical Engineering Case Studies

SWOOD add-ins for SolidWorks accelerated millwork design cycle by 30-40%

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Project in Brief
Challenges & Needs
Solution & Approach
Business Impact
Project Samples

Project Overview

Client Profile

Custom joinery and contract furniture manufacturing

Location

UK

Industry

Commercial millwork and furniture

Inputs

Architectural drawings of the store’s layout

Deliverables

3D CAD models and 2D drawings

Business Needs

Increase design productivity and accelerate the overall turnaround time.
Provide robust support for manufacturing with a single source of truth.
Lack of time for in-house resources to be trained on new software, such as SWOOD, and to use it on a daily basis.

Challenges

A lengthy learning curve, requiring 6-10 days of training, in the face of tight deadlines.
Library management of numerous parts for various hardware consumed a significant amount of time.
Difficulties arose in understanding pre-written scripts and rules prior to writing for higher effectiveness.

Our Solutions & Approach

Accelerate design cycle by up to 40% with SWOOD

Share Your Thoughts

An existing client, specializing in commercial joinery and furniture manufacturing, had purchased the industry-leading software, SWOOD. However, due to limited in-house resources and licenses, they approached the Hitech CADD Services team, which was already providing them with SolidWorks design drafting support.

Hitech Cash Counter

HT Paneling

A team of two dedicated Hitech CADD Services resources was assigned to the project.
The project team had no prior experience with SWOOD, so they underwent official training provided by the software-owning company.
Training for writing custom scripts and integrating SWOOD with SolidWorks lasted approximately two weeks.
Following this training, the team rewrote the existing scripts, and a large database of custom tools was created.
Specialized SolidWorks add-ins for millwork were developed in SWOOD Design for easy design in a 3D parametric environment.

Using this, the client was able to create:

Production-ready designs by leveraging features like sheet metal nesting to optimize material consumption.
Enhance material management by specifying grain direction, panel thickness, stock extensions etc.
Cutting list, hardware list, program list with label information with Bill of Material (BOM).

Using this approach, the client could completely eliminate the need to create DXF files separately which saved time and number of different documents created.