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Cabinet Vision 'Essential to our Success' says Leading Kitchen Company

With Planit’s Radan CAD/CAM software playing what CED Fabrications call “an essential role” in their stainless steel commercial kitchen business for more than a decade, they knew exactly what was needed when they set up a wood-based domestic kitchen division.

“Radan has paid for itself time and time again as a vital part of our sheet metal manufacturing process, and we realised that Cabinet Vision and Alphacam would be just as essential to the success of our new venture,” said CED’s Sales Director Andrew Siddle.

Based near Blackburn, CED Fabrications’ long-standing core business has been to manufacture commercial stainless steel kitchens for hospitals, schools, colleges, restaurants, pubs, motorway service stations – “in fact, our products are suitable wherever there’s a commercial kitchen,” adds Andrew Siddle (pictured left).

CED commercial kitchens and servery display counters can be found in Virgin Trains’ buffet cars, along with Debenhams, Sainsburys and Tescos restaurants. 

Over the last couple of years CED have also been producing a limited amount of wooden fascias and solid surface worktops for their stainless steel and shopfitted counter carcasses. “It’s necessary for us to provide this additional service ourselves rather than relying on a third party, and our new domestic kitchen business developed out of that. There’s great potential for us to grow into a large business in that sector, and Cabinet Vision and Alphacam will play a vital role in our plans to achieve that.”

The new woodworking plant houses an SCM CNC nesting/routing cell driven by Cabinet Vision Solid Ultimate with Screen-to-Machine, along with Alphacam router Advanced and Cabinet Door Manufacturing. Cabinet Vision’s Screen-to-Machine is the industry’s only fully integrated solution. It is capable of nesting and optimisation, and generates machine-ready code for saw, point-to-point machines, CNC routers, drill and dowel machines, chop saws, and other specialised woodworking machinery.

While CED have been using Alphacam to create the components and send toolpaths and manufacturing instructions to the CNC machines producing the wooden panels and worktops to go with their commercial kitchens, they are now using its Cabinet Door Manufacturing facility to meet demand for specialised production for the new domestic business. It gives instant parametric programming for the production of external, internal and fascia doors, along with an order-entry facility providing information for built-in, fully customisable bar coding and part labelling functions.

The flagship Cabinet Vision Ultimate keeps their simple tasks easy and makes the complex jobs possible. Andrew Siddle explains it is ideal for their new domestic operation because of its advanced solid modelling technology: “As well as producing pre-packed cabinets of standard sizes, Cabinet Vision Ultimate is also giving us the ability to offer bespoke sizes with no additional input from designers. Its flexibility to produce any size and variation of design is very important in helping to achieve good quality bespoke products while keeping costs down. It’s very impressive what it can do. Sometimes in business you look at something you want to do, and have to say ‘I can’t do that’, but with Cabinet Vision you can do it.”

It allows CED to design the entire kitchen or a single piece of cabinet furniture, automatically generate a full cutlist, photo realistic renders, working drawings, optimised nested sheets and a full costing function. CED use the costing function to create customised quotations directly from the design, including adjusting profit margins on individual jobs or components. This function gives full analysis on the breakdown of costs by material, labour and components, ensuring accurate costing.

All of the advanced software readily links directly to CED’s various brands of machinery, providing enhanced productivity, exceptional reliability and additional flexibility, all contributing to increased profitability.

Andrew Siddle’s confidence that Planit software will be essential to the domestic division’s success is borne out of lengthy experience of using a variety of Radan products for the successful fabrication of stainless steel commercial kitchen carcasses.

CED’s standard products are designed in SolidWorks, which is then imported directly into Radan as 2D drawings and flatpattern developments, the toolpaths are automatically added and the CNC programs generated with Radpunch. Radpunch’s revised user interface and graphics display now simplifies operation, while enhancements to the manufacturing database mean more information about the production process is captured by the system for use in future programs. Andrew Siddle says “a major advantage of Radan is that it not only manages their standard components swiftly and accurately, but it also means they can handle bespoke parts in their stride.”

“We process more than £1m worth of stainless steel raw material a year, and it’s very important to keep waste to a minimum. Using Radan, including  Radnest, ensures that our Trumpf Trumatic 3000R, is utilised to its full potential.

“With CED spending more than £1m on material we are always conscious of maintaining utilisation. Radnest has helped us achieve our goals. It’s the one software product we use to make the most of every single sheet of steel while producing high quality goods. Just 10% scrap would represent £100,000, while 12% is another £20,000. That would all come off our bottom line, so it’s absolutely vital that Radan’s nesters help to achieve maximum material utilisation.” 

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