Friday August 9, 2019 at 10:05am
On the 1st of July, Dean, Owen and I travelled to Montpellier to meet the team from EFICAD along with the other SWOOD resellers from across the globe. When being asked to travel for work, the south coast of France in the middle of summer is one of the best locations you could ask for! The event was split into 2 sides – Owen and Dean attended the technical seminars, where as I was on the sales/presales side. Along with the seminars, we got a lot of individual time to go through any technical issues or queries that we have encountered, plus group time with the other resellers which gave an insight into the way SWOOD is used across the world. | | |
Here is a brief
overview of the topics that were discussed and the future focus for EFICAD and
SWOOD;
Marketing
EFICAD
are branching out to a wider audience by increasing marketing by producing more
promotional videos, increasing presence on social networks and investing in
promotional stands at joinery/manufacturing exhibitions.
SWOOD
for Education
SWOOD
is being offered as a reduced cost educational version in order to raise
awareness of the product and train future joinery designers with SWOOD Design,
CAM and Nesting.
SWOOD
Centre
SWOOD
Centre is a new configuration tool enabling the user to customise frames and
layouts extremely easily using predefined parameters. This could be a very
useful and time saving tool for customers who provide multiple configurations
of their catalogue of parts (eg kitchen retailers who offer a range of styles,
handles, worktops etc.)
SWOOD
Toolbox
- SWOOD Rx is a tool to use to take a copy
of customers datasets and files for further investigation into any problems or
anomalies
- SWOOD Copy is a new product to speed up
applying toolpaths and drilling operations to SWOOD panels, frames and layouts.
This involves using a template panel with the desired machine operations
applied being used to apply this to every individual panel included in the
chosen assembly. This data would then be taken across into the nested assembly
if required.
- SWOOD B&W is a new package from
EFICAD aimed at the construction industry to provide automatic feature
recognition for specific CNC machines.
- Worktable Design is a new service EFICAD
offer to draw up the worktable of the CNC machine for customers so that pad,
material etc. positions can be predetermined.
SWOOD 2020+
EFICAD
were kind enough to share with us some of the up and coming features for SWOOD
which we were all very impressed with, these included:
Body to Panel – The ability to define a body
as a panel and divide it into individual bodies per material. Edge band
management will also be included with this allowing the user to easily select
between overlap type (which will also include mitre cut) and define the
edgeband as between laminates.
Surface Roughing - control
over the cutter path when setting up the roughing operations. EFICAD are also
working on automatic consideration of previous machining operations to reduce
multiple passes in areas that have already been machined.
Pocketing in machine software - Homag and WoodWOP machines
with the ability to automatically pocket recognised features will now be able
to utilise the SWOOD produced parts. This will hopefully be rolled out further
to other CNC machine brands.
Material Removal Simulation - One of the most requested
enhancements to SWOOD has been the ability to simulate material removal. This
will now be included in SWOOD 2020 for 3, 4 and 5-axis simulation. This result
can then be compared with the SOLIDWORK model to determine if further finishing
passes need to be added. Collision detection will also be included to when
creating toolpaths which will be especially useful when nesting or creating
toolpaths for complex geometry.
Overall,
this was a fantastic opportunity to finally meet the EFICAD team and find out
where the future of SWOOD is heading. They were able to answer all of the
technical questions that we had, and were happy to take on board all of the
suggestions and requests that we have for the coming SWOOD updates.
Along
with the beautiful location and weather (despite a sudden thunderstorm) the
EFICAD team were kind enough to provide us with amazing meals and evening
entertainment.
This
was a mutually beneficial visit which hopefully we will be able to repeat. | | |