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The rigorous demands of today’s ultra-connected consumer, can—and must—be met. With efficiency, collaboration, and minimized production interruption, furniture companies are now able to bring their product to market quicker than ever.

We’ve put together a practical guide, “Mapping Process Improvement Points for Furniture Production,” that outlines how Industry 4.0 technologies can be applied to each production step of the upholstered furniture production process to meet next-generation market demand.

Understand how the traditional production process has been rethought at every stage:

• Design and Virtual Prototyping software, with a special attention to costing, standardization and design review phases
• Pattern making
• Marker-Making
• Automated fabric and leather cutting
• Off-loading and beyond

Improvements need to be made at every step for companies to stay in the game. Know-how and Industry 4.0 technology can make it happen. Get the guide.

The consumer is ready and waiting; the technology has been developed; the data is available. To satisfy the increasingly speedy delivery expectations of the furniture industry’s ultra-connected customer base, furniture makers need to bring their product to market quicker than ever before, and offer more variations and customization within these same reduced timeframes.

Is this a tall order? No, it’s a timely one. Industry 4.0 technologies enable companies to revisit traditionally time-consuming processes at every step to evolve towards a new kind of connected, collaborative and automated upholstered furniture manufacturing process. In fact, recent studies show 29% of Eastern European and 21% of Western European  furniture companies cite process optimization tasks—such as streamlining production processes, reducing production errors and waste, and increasing visibility  over manufacturing processes—as essential to achieving company goals. 

Manufacturing more efficiently is not only faster, it cuts costs and improves end-quality and work environments by streamlining furniture production processes and bypassing time- consuming rework, while reducing— and in some cases downright eliminating— production disruptions and downtime. Traditionally a linear and time-intensive product development process, furniture manufacturing is more collaborative and agile with industry 4.0 technology and processes.

To explain how, this e-guide guide follows a minimalist two-seater sofa with a caramel leather back and base, completed with oatmeal linen-upholstered seat cushions, as it makes its way through the manufacturing process of a hypothetical furniture manufacturing company—The Way Forward—from conception to off-loading.

The Way Forward uses data, cloud connectivity and system integration to link and accelerate each step of production. The end-to-end flow of data is an integral and crucial element of digital manufacturing. This digital thread of information—that connects each stage of the process, from design to production— eliminates the silos that often generate inefficiencies in the production process.