As a cabinet design engineer, I probably spent 45% of my project time within the confines of whatever cabinet design software package I was using at the time...Cabnetware, Cabinetvision, 20/20...whatever. The remaining 55% of my time was spent shuffling paper around, walking back and forth from my desk to the printer, making copies, filling out purchase orders ( in some other program or by hand ), filing project folders, calling vendors, finding best prices, following up on door orders....blah, blah, blah.
Does this sound at all familiar? The thing that is very obvious to me is that cabinet design software is very good at its core functions but its core functions are just a subset of your business's core functions. At its very essence, cabinet design software assists you in creating cutlists and materials lists and printing out support documents for those cabinet projects. There are some shops out there that don't use some of the features of bundled cabinet design software because of various limitations. For example, I know of a large shop that uses Excel for bidding instead of the bidding features of Cabnetware. At Craftsman Woodworks, I used Quickbooks for our main accounting features including payroll, time records keeping, A/R and A/P.
As cabinet makers, cabinet manufacturers and business people, we get used to using electronic tools to make our jobs easier, faster and more profitable. As a casual observer of the business world, I can't help but notice that the big companies, big business doesn't do things the same way I do. I'm fairly certain that the engineers at Kraftmaid aren't counting doors and filling out purchase orders for 112 Salice hinges....by hand. And I'll bet you a handful of chocolate doughnuts that they don't use Excel to write a bid.
Without going into a big thing about what ERP software is ( because there are plenty of resources on the internet which go into great detail about ERP ), I believe there is a huge need in our industry to integrate cabinet design software and all the other various programs we use in our business. This will be my primary focus here at Cabinet Design Engineer.
In the coming days, weeks and months, I hope to open up a dialog with you and your colleagues about how we can improve our businesses and our business processes to that we can become more profitable. These are some really tough times. And I believe as business owners, we need to work smarter, not harder.
I have started the process of writing Cabinet Maker Manager, an ERP system designed just for the cabinet manufacturing industry.
In future blog posts, I will be describing the features of Cabinet Maker Manager and I'll explain how you can become involved in the development of this software.
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