The situation
A furniture factory’s foaming department had become the constraint everyone could feel and nobody had measured. Cushion parts queued for cutting, the machine sat idle between jobs, and three people moved between two cutting tables without any of them being the reason work moved faster.
What we found
We spent three days watching orders travel through the department: where parts waited, who handled them, and what the machine was doing while people were busy. The first finding had nothing to do with software. Two cutting tables were one table too many. Two people on a single sheet, with a queue of foam blocks staged before the machine, could hold the same output while the machine kept cutting.
The second finding was a preparation problem. Cutting layouts were drawn by hand, shapes were not accurate, and preparing a day of cutting files took longer than running them.
What changed first
The workspace. Tables, staging space for foam blocks and shelving for cut parts were rearranged before any software was written, so the system could be sized around the bottleneck that remained rather than the one we could have removed for free.
What is being built
A focused system that does one job: take the week’s furniture orders, convert them through a product database into every foam part needed, group those parts by foam type and thickness, nest them into optimised layouts for the sheet size, and export DXF files the cutting machine runs directly. No dashboards the department did not ask for.
What came out of it
The nesting engine at the centre of that system turned out to be useful on its own, so we published it as a free browser-based DXF nesting tool. Machinists gave it a warm reception and a list of improvement requests, which is the best kind of review.
Status: department reorganised, free tool published, full system in build.
