SWOOD Days 2019

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.