Sunrise Wood Designs uses CABINET VISION to produce a high-volume of custom residential projects
Sunrise Wood Designs uses a masterful combination of talent and technology to serve the largest residential market in the United States.
Located in Dallas, Texas, the 12-year-old company serves the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area, for which it builds cabinetry for roughly one-third of all of the region’s new homes. Sunrise Wood Designs operates two plants to turn out cabinetry for about 30 houses per day — including jobs that range from modular to highly custom kitchens, bathrooms, dens, built-ins and more.
“We are the largest custom residential-cabinet maker in North Texas, and there are two things that makes us unique; first that we design, produce, and install our own cabinets, and second, we work in both the volume home building and high-end custom home building segments,” said Chief Operating Officer Geoffrey Athey of Sunrise Wood Designs.
Sunrise Wood Designs employs a staff of 300 and produces about 2,000 cabinets each week. On any given day, the company delivers products to between 130 and 150 different addresses.
About 80 percent of the company’s work is high-volume, custom cabinetry, while 10 percent is high end or luxury cabinets with the remaining 10 percent being more modular in nature. The company utilizes dedicated paint and stain departments, complete with seven paint booths and piped-in lines, capable of pre-finishing up to 700 cabinets per day.
“Multiple floor plans for a particular subdivision may be the similar, but the majority of what we do is custom cabinetry because most framers do not follow their floor plans,” Athey said.
To produce a high volume of custom cabinetry, Sunrise Wood Designs used Cabnetware software for about 14 years before transitioning to the CABINET VISION Screen-to-Machine™ (S2M) solution in 2016.
“We use CABINET VISION every day, and we couldn’t live without it,” said Vice President of Design Terry Moore. “The program generates the drawings and the cut sheets for us and, without it, we couldn’t do what we do. Everyone here knows how to use it, and every department in this company uses it.”
The company relies upon the design, job-planning and CNC production capabilities of CABINET VISION to manage jobs across roughly 11 different product lines.
As with any CABINET VISION project, the Sunrise design team begins each job by using the dimensions of the space in which the project will be installed, and then builds the job within that virtual space. Due to the volume of projects built by the company, the team uses a master plan that contains several floor plans for each subdivision. Once the actual building site is measured, those existing floor plans are adjusted to reflect accurate dimensions.
As CABINET VISION enables users to save processes, Moore and his design team are able to edit and reuse processes saved from previous programs. This cuts programming time, and is especially helpful for jobs that are similar or nearly identical.
“Our goofy term for saved processes is ‘Do Likes,’ because we know that there are jobs that we can do the same way we’ve done previous jobs,” Moore said. While saved processes are helpful for any kind of similar jobs, the ability to edit residential subdivision floor plans simplifies the management of the company’s large, detailed projects.
“We’ll save the design as the plan number, which we get from the purchase order, and then save the tweaked plan as the actual address of the project,” Moore said. “The ability to do that makes everything a lot easier to work with.”
CABINET VISION’s ability to quickly generate shop drawings also makes the software a useful graphical tool for communicating job details at a glance. “We’re production based, so the black-and-white lines and bird’s-eye views that we can generate just by clicking a button are great,” Moore said.
To automate some of its processes, Sunrise Wood Designs takes advantage of CABINET VISION User Created Standards (UCSs) to automatically apply custom construction methods under specific job conditions. For instance, if a user prefers a certain construction method when working with a particular type of material, CABINET VISION applies a UCS for that method when the material is used.
Further embracing the customizable nature of the software, the Sunrise design team also creates custom cut lists for its shop-floor staff.
Moore notes that CNC production allows the company to complete several operations in one setup, which saves time and reduces scrap. With the use of CABINET VISION, more complex jobs — such as those that require grain matching — can be completed both quickly and without error.
“When we do the grain matching, it works great — and doing that by hand is a nightmare to get right. Now, we just cut them out on a router and label them, and it goes together perfectly.”
Moore said that Sunrise Wood Designs receives top-notch sales and service support from the CABINET VISION team, and that he frequently takes advantage of the solution’s popular user forum and online eSupport system to seek input from peers.
“CABINET VISION does a great job answering questions on eSupport, and it’s also easy to find someone to talk to who has had the same challenges that we’ve had.”
About the company
Name: Sunrise Wood Designs
Business: High-volume custom residential cabinetry
Web: https://www.sunrisewooddesigns.com
Benefits achieved
- Ease in managing projects for 11 unique product lines
- Rapid generation of high-quality shop drawings
- Ability to create custom cut lists