Drawer maker uses optimization software to drive its entire production process
From Modern Woodworking Magazine:
For Top Drawer Components, it’s not about moving as much material through the plant as possible. It’s about how to maximize the efficiency of your cutting operations and reduce waste while increasing accuracy and improving margins on the drawers it makes.
The dovetail drawer manufacturer serves kitchen cabinet and furniture manufacturers nationwide from its 30,000-sq.-ft. plant in Apache Junction, Ariz. Calculating yield used to be a real headache for the company.
“We used to have a cumbersome optimization process installed,” says Brian Emerson, president. “It all had to be done by hand. Our biggest problem was our operators setting the rip fence on the panel saw at 3/8” rather than 5/8”, which led to a lot of parts that were the wrong size.”
Emerson took drastic measures and completely revamped his production process. He purchased Eurosoft’s ARDIS optimization software, and says the program now drives the company’s entire manufacturing process.
“We use it to cut our drawer bottoms and for generating our rip lists for drawer side material for use with our Selco EB100 CNC panel sizing center,” says Emerson. “We also use it to optimize all of our linear cutting on our Grecon OptiCut 104 optimizing saw. Once the job order is entered in the software, the program tells me how many pieces of material I need to put in front of the saw in order to cut up the day’s work into drawer parts. Basically, it handles most of our production process.”
Emerson says the time savings and accuracy provided by the ARDIS software were significant over the company’s previous manual optimizing calculations and production methods.
“I have to say that it has cut our preparation time for the day’s work by as much as 75 percent,” says Emerson. “The biggest boon for us has been that everything is consistently the right size because now the parts are being cut on a computerized saw and there is no manual entering anywhere. The only time we have a part that is cut incorrectly is if somebody put it in the order system wrong.
“Since we switched over to using the ARDIS software, we have improved our material costs by 15 percent as we have tweaked the program to do what we want it to do. Our material costs used to be close to 50 percent of product sold. Now, we are down in the 33-percent to 35-percent range.”
