Easing production links

When an electrical storm and consequent power surge earlier this year damaged their CAD/CAM application which prepared design work for production on their CNC, Focus Joinery were faced with a long wait for a new licence key to be shipped from Europe. Instead they spoke to Anthony Scammell from Design2Cam who suggested they upgrade their PRO100 design package to the new CNC version which runs seamlessly from design to production - it was a good move.

Based in Huntly, Focus Joinery produce kitchens, house lots and general cabinetry, largely for private clients where they enjoy the more personal approach. Their work reflects this and tends to be bespoke and one-off

The company had been using PRO100 for its design requirements for a number of years and both owner Zane Vandy and his son Isaac were familiar with and liked the program.

“When our system crashed back in February Anthony was one of the first people we spoke to and he suggested we look at updating to the latest version of PRO100 which links directly to CNC machinery, meaning we didn’t need to use any third party software,” says Zane.

Focus Joinery were one of the first in the country to start using the software which gave them a certain guinea pig or beta status which they have used well to set up the software to suit their own production requirements.

“Anthony was 90% of the way there,” says Isaac who uses the software most and worked with Anthony in setting up their library.

“He has developed a generic library for NZ conditions and we were able to customise that to suit our particular manufacturing set up. Basically we set up templates for our likely requirements and I can then cut and paste from those to develop the cabinetry or design we want for any given job.

I like the time savings involved in the ‘do it once and then reuse’ concept.

“The new version is a great package, easy to use and very quick. You can see what is going on at every design stage, making it easy to see if something is right or not as you do it. From there taking the design to production simply involves a couple of clicks and then you can leave it alone as PRO100 creates the code and prepares the job for the CNC. There used to be a lot of cross checking and input involved at this stage so it has freed up my time considerably.”

“The service from Design2Cam has been unreal, Anthony has been helpful with everything, even with extra stuff, he is a good bloke to work with. I would highly recommend him and the new version of PRO100, it has streamlined our production process considerably and I am finding as we develop it more and more the time savings just go up and up,” says Isaac.