Pinnacle
Furniture

Background:

Pinnacle Furniture LLP started out as a sales-only business supplying furniture to schools & colleges. When enquiries for bespoke fitted installations began coming in, they jumped at the opportunity to grow the business. Suddenly they found themselves having to make the transition to a designer/manufacturer.

Having started developing their own range of stock cabinets & related furniture on paper, Pinnacle quickly recognised the benefits of moving to a 3D CAD system. In March of 2013 they invested in a license of Solidworks & sent their operations manager on a 4 day training course with Solid Solutions.

The problem:

The team at Pinnacle had no prior in-house experience of Design for Manufacture, standard engineering practices, drafting, document management, tolerances, revision control, Bills of Materials (BoM), template setup or how best to use Solidworks to facilitate these. Our brief was to:

  1. Expand the available design capacity
  2. Increase design process efficiency
  3. Provide on-site Solidworks expertise
  4. Introduce standard industry design & drafting work practices

The solution:

When we started working with Pinnacle, it quickly became apparent that the size of the work load precluded redesign of the working systems in place. Design throughput became the priority, so after some short discussions it was decided that there would be two phases to our involvement:

 

  1. Review & optimise all templates & sheet formats. Perform all quick-fix changes available to speed up work flow.
  2. Re-structure all existing standard part/assembly files & consolidate individual configurations, to optimise BoM table clarity. A standard build instructions hand book would then be created & distributed to fitters.
  3. A tailored Product Design Specification (PDS) document to collate all the information required by the designers was distributed to all up-stream departments.
  4. Due to previous experience with the Manufacturing Advisory Service, we were able to secure grant funding to help fund Pinnacle’s growth.

Client feedback:

 

“An excellent, very detailed and methodical approach to our project. This flowed through the entire process, ensuring that goals were achieved on-time. The drawing presentation was concise, detailed and clear. A great end result.”

 

Daryl Stanley, Managing Director

For further information, go to https://pinnacle-furniture.co.uk/

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