room and cabinet dimensioning using a dxf for reference

[Brad Moore]

Hi
I'm new to eCabinets and am wondering if I can bring in a dxf or dwg file of the keyplan of a room to use as a direct reference for dimensioning the walls and cabinets. Most of the time we have to bid and fabricate to designs supplied by a third party, like an architect. It would be faster and more accurate if we could use their dxf layout plan to snap in walls and cabinet dimensions. Cabinet Vision gave a fairly effective demonstration of how they can import a dxf in room layout view, then use the nodes of the dxf as reference points to snap in wall and cabinet dimensions. It's very quick, particularly for quoting when you don't want to spend a lot of time up front but must still be accurate for pricing. Can this be done in eCabinets?
Thank you.
Brad

[Kerry Fullington]

Brad,

That would be a nice feature but is not available in eCabinets at this time.

Kerry

[Michael S Murray]

Brad,
I have struggled with this same thing, but in reality, you will be hard pressed to get a architect to let you have actual dxf drawings of his work. They usually send them out in pdf. Your experience might be different.
FYI, we dont draw anything until some one pays us to do it, such as shop drawings. We never draw a commercial job to get a bid price.

[Brad Moore]

Thanks for the answers. I'm probably under the wrong assumption, but I thought that once I know ecabinets I could use it to generate a more accurate price estimate then our current method, which is using an excel spreadsheet populated with our generic component part pricing that we just pick quantities and add up the totals. We quote several small jobs per day in the 20K range, and at least one big one a week in the 200K+ range. Our current method is easy but we make a lot of assumptions. I was hoping ecabinets will help us refine our quoting by giving us a more precise control over what will become our costs if we win the job, and give us more knowledge to cut margins if we need to win the job. In your opinion is it too labour intesive to use ecabinets for estimating jobs we have less than 50% chane of winning?
Thanks
Brad

[Kerry Fullington]

Brad,

First of all this is just my opinion. I am one of the biggest proponents of eCabinet Systems Software but it does have it's limitations.
As far as calculating costs for materials especially after Version 6 is released, eCabinets is great. You will be able to account for every piece of a cabinet down to the last screw. As for calculating your labor costs I think eCabinets falls short. It is basically just guess work with no real basis for the input other than what you "think" your costs are. I use eCabinets for material costs and a spread sheet for labor calculations.
I also feel that eCabinets will be pretty labor intensive to produce drawings for the volume of work you are talking about. Of course much of this will depend on how many people you have drafting and how you build. If you are building standardized cabinets that you can just drop into a room for your drawing then it would be possible. If your jobs are truly custom complicated one offs then it is going to be more difficult to produce that kind of volume.
If you work a great deal with architects then you are also going to find the line drawings cumbersome. At this time there is nothing automated for dimensions and there is no good way to actually "Scale" your drawings. The line drawing editor works great for a shop like mine where the drawings are just for my own reference but might be too time consuming for an architect to look at, once again at the volume you are trying to produce.
eCabinet Systems is great for cut lists and CNC output and truly is one of the best packages available for residential design and drawing. (there are few limitations here) It also produces some of the best 3D visualizations in the industry.
The greatest asset of eCabinet Systems software is the team behind it. Support is the best and the development team will listen to your wish list and ideas so if you should decide to go with eCabinets you can definitely influence the directions of new releases.
For me eCabinets has been the best solution I could have chosen. Keep asking questions here and you might find that it is the right solution for you as well.

All this being said, I think any other solution you might find that is going to do comercial case work and true architectural drawing that will produce 3D images as well as eCabinets are going to cost in the 20K to 30K range so maybe the limitations you might find in eCabinets might be a nice trade off

Kerry

[Joe Dusel]

We quote several small jobs per day in the 20K range, and at least one big one a week in the 200K+ range.

Doing some quick math if you say you are getting about 50% to the jobs you bid on I figure you are doing around $5,000,000 a year in business. If that is right, what is stopping you from dropping $14K or so on Cabinet Vision which you already like for the DXF features? (Damn, if I got one $200K project I would place a rush order for a Thermwood CNC.)

eCabinet Systems is a decent software package, but it does not do everything I want (yet). It will now give you a very accurate estimate of your materials as Kerry said "down to the last screw", but as far as labor estimates go, I still use a spreadsheet myself. If you have standard cabinets that you sell you can setup Catalog Cabinets which would be your selling price for those cabinets.

[Kerry Fullington]

Brad,

I am not trying to turn you away from eCabinet Systems or sell you on any other software because the fact is that any cabinet manufacturing software package is going to have it's limitations and the more you want them to do the steeper the learning curve is going to be and more time each design is going to take.
It might help to know what your needs are going to be, what you are trying to design and how you build.
How detailed do your line drawings need to be? Is there a great deal of custom work or mainly standardized boxes? Curved work?

I hope some others speak up here because I know there are a lot of shops turning out work much faster and at a greater volume than I do using eCabinets. They can probably answer your questions better than I can.

Kerry

[Michael S Murray]

There is no way you should even consider doing drawings to get a estimate at that level. There are several excellent and fast stand alone estimating packages available. I do not feel like e-cabs should waste a minute more on estimating, other than material qty. for actual ordering. Line drawing editor and printing to scale are high on my wish list and both are pretty important if e-cabs wants to get into the commercial shops that actually use routers.I use e-cabs for residential design and commercial cutting, but do not use it for shop drawings or estimating. I seriously do not know any one who does commercial work that uses any design software to do estimating.

[George Davidson]

Some times I will make one up in SB take it out of SB as a DXF put it in a CAD program then turn it into a STL file and put it into e-Cabinet as a STL

[George Davidson]

Design

[Neville Bastian]

Hi Brad,
I also cost out large and small jobs and if they are within the run of the mill construction its fairly straight forward to do a time and material list. I should be using Ecabinets for this but I haven't been able to change my habits. I actual draw things twice. One for quoting in a Planit program and have my production planner redraw it for Ecabinets for the Thermwood.
One thing we have been trying to perfect is use a spreadsheet like you do with a generic set of cabinets with materials and times based on stretched sizes so its a parametric cost. Thus we can have endless cabinet designs with materials based on the defaults we choose. Once we have the kitchen cabinets listed we have a kitchen estimate. To fine tune that estimate we then export that into Ecabinets after we choose the closest Ecabinet library cabinet that matches the spreadsheet one.We do this with a custom database type program. Once we have imported them in the batch we then can fine tune them in Ecabinets as far as machining goes or adding hardware so we get a material list down to the last screw as Kerry pointed out. We also get a list of sheets we need to buy from the optimiser so get a accurate cost that includes wastage.
We then re-enter this back into the spreadsheet with actual material required and the labour cost based on our quoting spreadsheet. In our case we break this down into work zones or centres. This then allows us to see how our quote estimate times relate back to our time clock data. Any difference we can fine tune generic cabinets if we have been to mean with our times.

To do large projects with our system would require a lot of setup and maybe not worth it if you don't have the cabinet construction from the architect repeat it self on future projects.
As far as giving money to Planit to give you the plan reading software just be aware of once the money is paid there will be no fine tuning as they don't have the same attitude as Ecabinets. I don't think you get out of it for under $70K myself. I hope I haven't lampooned them too much to get into trouble with Jason its just I have too much history with them.
Thermwood do custom programming. Maybe ask the question on what they would charge to get what you want. Give them a must have list and wish list. Maybe this front end program will be a cheaper option for you.
It could also be a sellable program as I have spent ages on mine and its still a big work in progress scenario.
Best of luck
Regards
Neville

[Brad Moore]

Thank you all for your comments.
It seems that we should stick to our spreadsheet method for estimating, refining our data based on increased data from actual jobs. We do have a big bottleneck at shop drawings, but I asked that in another post and it seems eCabinets strength comes after that stage too. I'm just trying to get my head around where eCabinets fits into the whole process.
Brad