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Leisure Creations has been manufacturing stylish, durable commercial-grade outdoor furniture, from stylish patio sets to commercial pool furnishings, in Alabama for nearly 20 years.

Leisure Creations takes its motto, “Quality First”, very seriously. The company prides itself on producing furniture that has the longest total life cycle with the lowest life cycle cost in the industry. The company’s clients can customize most models in 60 sling fabrics, 88 cushion fabrics, 18 frame finishes and even more material options. 

The company decided it was time to consider a new production method when they realized their manual workflow was making it difficult to keep up with orders and hindering their ability to grow. Difficulty finding skilled workers was also a key factor in their decision to move to a more automated process. 

The company was particularly interested in increasing cutting room productivity, reducing use of paper patterns, and minimizing waste.

“We had a lot of waste in the process. Everything from fabric waste to workers and man-hours and everything in between, from the start to the end of the process,” explains Chris Williams, the owner and president of Leisure Creations.  

To help Leisure Creations reach their objectives, ����AV suggested implementing Furniture On Demand by ����AV.

Furniture On Demand by ����AV is the furniture industry’s first end-to-end, single-ply fabric cutting solution. The comprehensiveness of the solution was one of the major selling points for Chris Williams: “What ����AV offered that I hadn’t seen before was a beginning to end process, from the order input to shipping the customer the furniture at the end of the process. Everything was tied together.”

Easy connectivity/integration between Furniture On Demand and Leisure Creation’s Salesforce order system was the key to achieving a more optimized order process. Leisure Creation’s sales representatives use Salesforce to start a quote, which includes all the information supplied by the client.  

Once a quote becomes an order, its cutting dates are scheduled. The order is then sent from Salesforce directly to Furniture On Demand.  “Everything that’s in the order is cut on the machine without anyone having to do anything. This has really streamlined our system,” says Aprile Harris, Furniture On Demand Supervisor. 

“Before we’d run 4,000 - 6,000 yards per week. It was taking us 60 to 70 hours a week at six days a week. Now, we’re doing that same production schedule with three employees at 32 to 40 hours per week, and we’re cutting 4,000-6,000 yards per week. The same schedule, but with the time cut almost in half,” explains Brent Collum, Engineering Manager. 

Furniture On Demand’s optimum piece placement and highly precise cutting means all pieces are cut to the right size and dimensions. This has allowed the company to save 20% on fabric, and reduce sewing labor by 20% due to the reduced need for reworking. 

The Furniture On Demand production dashboard has also played a key role in helping Leisure Creations optimize scheduling. “The Furniture On Demand production dashboard is an amazing tool. We daily report on the numbers that come directly out of Furniture On Demand. I present the amount of yards that we cut every day, the efficiency that the machine ran and the time that we ran it for that previous day. From that, we know how to schedule employees. We know how many hours of production we need to run,” explains Chris Williams. 

For Chris, the Furniture On Demand system “is seamless from quote to shipment of the order, and helps make us a more sustainable company. ����AV sets up this system to be with us long term for many, many years. I would highly recommend ����AV to someone else.”