By Michael F. Carmichael
May 19, 2011
What do DeLaval cream separators and the furniture in your office have in common? They may have been designed on computer systems using a software program from a Swedish company.
DeLaval is a long-established name in the American dairy industry. They make everything from those machines that separate cream from milk to a line of robots that can do the actual milking. They were founded in Sweden in the late 1800s and now have a global presence.
Steelcase is a long-established name in the commercial furniture industry. They were founded in 1912 in Grand Rapids, Mich.
Those two companies, in different industrial sectors, both design many of their products using computer software from Configura, a 21-year-old company that got its start in Linköping, Sweden.
| Configura's office in Grand Rapids. |
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Five years ago Configura wanted to broaden their global footprint – and opened an office in Grand Rapids, Mich.
Why Grand Rapids? To begin with, it has much longer summers than Sweden. It’s also at the heart of the U.S. commercial furniture industry. The father of one of the founders of Configura owned a commercial furniture company in Sweden. “He knew that selling commercial office furniture was a complex sell because there are so many variations,” explains Peter Brandinger, the Swede in charge of Configura’s west Michigan office. “His son was a computer science major at the local university. The son and a friend started trying to figure out ways to use technology to make his dad’s job easier.”
“As a consumer you can walk into a retail furniture showroom, see a sofa and chairs and know exactly what they look like and what they will cost,” says Brandinger. “In the commercial office sector there are many more things involved. You have to work with someone who can figure out what you need, then they have to take a lot of time to figure out what it’s going to cost and then someone has to build everything.”
| Configura VP Peter Brandinger and company CEO Johan Lyreborn accept 2008 best of category award at NeoCon. |
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Computer technology was a boon to the contract furniture business in the ’80s with the spread of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software. As it did in the automotive industry, CAD programs made it much easier to do the grunt work of designing routine furniture such as chairs and desks. But their additional functionality was limited.
“The [CAD] design tools that existed, (and still exist),” says Configura client Steve Ericsson of Grand Rapids-based Steelcase, one of the country’s leading commercial furniture makers, “did little to help the dealer designer understand product application rules and available options as they created solutions. The tools did not have the ability to automatically generate supports, brackets and electrical harnesses. And, they did very little to help the designer, the sales person and the customer see the solutions in 3D, especially when it came to representing chosen surface materials.”
Configura’s Brandinger says that not only does the software do all of that, but it then “connects to the Steelcase ordering system so that it orders the right parts.” He explains that while his other commercial furniture clients make similar products, “their manufacturing systems are different, their engineering is different, so what we do for them has to be different as well.”