Ahead of the Curve

Planit’s closet-specific software helps keep custom closet manufacturer on the cutting edge

Bluffton, S.C.-based Closet Specialist LLC is accustomed to being ahead of the curve. After all, the family-owned company has been manufacturing and installing custom closets for 23 years, long before the huge boom in the closet industry. Since its inception, Closet Specialist has relied on software for design and manufacturing, beginning in the mid-1980s with the DOS version of Cabinet Vision Solid. Through the years the company has upgraded software platforms to have access to the best programs available. This summer, it upgraded from Solid Design to Solid Manufacturing for Closets, the software company’s first offering engineered specifically for the closet manufacturing market.

“What our previous software platform did for us was great,” says Joshua Klein, vice president of operations. “It was the top-of-the-line software for kitchen cabinets, but we had to adapt it for closets and manipulate it to do what we want. We would use it to generate a three-dimensional rendering and go into Microsoft Word or Excel to generate cut lists and pricing sheets. When we’d submit the cut lists to the shop, the saw operator would have to take the time to calculate how many and what size strips of material he’d need. As far as waste and yield, we had no idea what we were getting out of a sheet of material.

“With the upgrade to Solid Manufacturing for Closets, now when we design a project, a program within the software platform optimizes the cut list for yield and waste and submits it straight to the panel saw and point-to-point machining center on the shop floor. It completely takes the guesswork out of it for the saw operator. Now he just pulls the job up on the screen and the program tells him how to position the material. It then prints out a barcode label for every piece that he applies before the parts are sent downstream. At the machining center, the operator scans the barcodes and the software automatically tells him what part it is and where to put the part on the machine.”
 
Closet Specialist’s upgrade to Solid Manufacturing for Closets allowed the company to cut its production time nearly in half. “If an average $4,000 job used to take three hours to produce, now it takes us about an hour and a half,” says Klein. “And we’re still getting comfortable with the new software, we’re probably at 85 percent proficiency. It isn’t an off-the-shelf program, but once you get it set up to run the way you want it, it runs flawlessly.”

In addition to time savings, Klein says the Solid Manufacturing for Closets program has almost completely eliminated cutting errors on the shop floor. “Now, all the work and calculation is done on the front end in the design phase,” he says. “It puts the onus on the designer rather than the guys on the shop floor. But all that front-end work speeds up production and reduces the chance for cutting errors.”

Featured in November 2007 Modern Woodworking

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