WESTAND is a shop fitting company responsible for producing commercial stands for high-end companies. Discover how SWOOD helped WESTAND to improve its design and production process.
About WESTAND
Industry – Shop fitting, residential furniture
Size – 50-100 employees
Location – Greece
Used case – Design & Manufacturing
Products used – SWOOD Design & SWOOD CAM
Sales Partner – AlfaSolid Works, Greece
WESTAND S.A. is active in furniture construction since 1979, specialising in the construction of commercial furniture since 1986 and having completed the commercial equipment of several shops in Greece and other countries. It also specialises in designing and constructing special commercial stands and offers innovative solutions and special applications to boutiques, pharmacies, hairdressers, spa centres and any other facility upon request.
The company’s goal is the development of premium furniture combining ergonomics and top construction quality with higher aesthetics, always meeting customer needs, and providing high-quality services.
The company’s philosophy is based on the following characteristics:
- High quality
- Consistent delivery
- Competitive prices
Looking for a solution to improve the production line
As Loukia Aliferi, Head of the Design Department of WESTAND, states: “In the last 3 years, we also developed ‘Rangahaus’, which is a workshop inside the factory that specializes mostly in solid wood furniture for residential use. We specialize in cosmetics stands. Our clients are big international fashion brands”.
Loukia also adds that their primary goal is to construct furniture with top-notch production quality. Therefore, they invest in new technologies as they want their production line to be more efficient; she declares, “For that reason, we selected the company AlfaSolid, which supports us with SOLIDWORKS and SWOOD.”
Moving from the traditional way of designing
According to Gerolimos Nikitas, the Industrial and Product Designer, they faced a lot of problems while designing traditionally. According to him, the designing process used to be too time-consuming, so they were looking for a solution that would help them with improving the process.
After the initial onboarding phase, the design team at WESTAND has already seen many of their challenges being solved. As Gerolimos puts it, “With SWOOD, we have been able to resolve many problems that we have faced in the past. Now, we can do a lot of things faster, although we are relatively new as well as new users of the software SWOOD. […] we have already witnessed in some of our stands and products that we can speed up several of their processes, which before were a lot more time-consuming.”
WESTAND quickly found out the advantages of using the SWOOD Design features. They are particularly impressed because the solution is parametric and easily adaptable to their needs.
Gerolimos commented that SWOOD also gives them the capability to create their libraries: “This is our most important goal, to create our libraries with furniture whose dimensions we can easily adjust.”
During the early stages of using SWOOD Design, they already discovered another advantage of the solution, which was that “SWOOD Design allows us to easily discover the quantity of the materials that we consume, as well as what is needed for each furniture before its manufacturing”, adds Gerolimos.
One other advantage is using the SWOOD Report which allows companies like WESTAND to be more ecological, by knowing the exact number of supplies that they need.
A CAM solution working seamlessly with the Design solution
The manufacturing team at WESTAND had to ensure good communication between the design team and the manufacturing team to increase their production line.
Ioannis Kountasakis works in the CNC department at WESTAND, and he immediately saw the problems in the production process and how they can be solved.
Their company was using 3 different software to cut a piece, which was time-consuming, and a lot of information was being lost.
The CNC department wanted a complete solution to reduce any errors during this process. This is when AlfaSolid introduced SWOOD and SOLIDWORKS as a complete solution to solve the problem of both design and manufacturing.
Ioannis comments, “Now, with SOLIDWORKS, we use only SWOOD for our CNC machines in collaboration with our design software.”
In the end, he adds, “We would like to thank AlfaSolid for their help.” Indeed, AlfaSolid provide them with the SWOOD solution, which allowed them to do their job faster, better, more easily and with no errors.
As a satisfied customer, WESTAND recommends SWOOD Design and SWOOD CAM to any fast-growing company, if they want to improve their production line and reduce any errors.
