I have recently become the foreman of a cabinet and millwork shop that is very outdated (Plastic laminate parts are edge banded by hand). It is a mess really. I have some ideas for improvements, but wanted to know if there is a one stop shop for the best practices, size of tooling (there is a big difference between a 30K and 300K edge bander), cabinet design and streamlined production.

I don’t think our shop is large enough for a CNC, but we defiantly need an edge bander, panel saw, cabinet software where I can design and make cuts lists so that different people can work on doors and drawers and cabinet carcass without one waiting on another. Currently the practice is cut parts on the slider, assemble the carcass, then measure those for doors and drawers. Our cabinets sides are dadoed for the top and bottom, plus some cabinets are a bit smaller than pictured on the plan for scribes which makes building the doors and drawers at the same time impossible with our current practice.

We also make a lot of Corian Solid surface. Our work is a majority commercial, but some residential for our commercial clients. We are a large commercial construction company with a small cabinet and millwork division.

We have a lot of bad habits to break, but the upside is that it should not be too hard to make improvement. :-) Thank you in advanced for any advice you offer.

Seems to me that the owner has to be sold on this idea otherwise it is a moot point.

If you're big enough for a panel saw you are bid enough for a CNC router but that might be tough to sell to him.

Does he go to the woodworking shows?

Like Pat said, money talks, so owner has to be on board.
Every years tons of great woodworking equipment is sold used around the world, you could even spend $15000 on a good used edgebander that would do up to 3 mm and corner rounding. Edge banding anything by hand is labour intensive and my experience is that the quality of the finished product is worse than an edge bander.
This applies to every kind of machinery, but at the end of the day you need a budget

Agreed on all points. If the one who signs the checks hasnt assigned you a budget its hard to quantify any perspective purchases. So much depends on the type of work you do, your exposure to liability (timeline), and so on. Easy to come up with a pie in the sky package that the owner will never sign off on.

These scenarios always seem to me like a shop that has been somewhat drunk on low wage overhead and somewhat of a low bar for overhead. Its not to say a shop needs a top of the line laser bander but on the flip side if your in crunch work and you ride on an older bander (we do) and it breaks down, your screwed or gonna get sued.

Seems you need to post the scope of work, quantity of work, and more over what the owners willingness to invest in the operation is. All options are sunk based on what the owners willingness is. If he's hired a new foreman yet been unwilling to invest in some core equipment my guess is it may be a hard fight to get him to spend on the business.

Thank you for the advice, but I think we got derailed a bit speculating about what the owner may not may not want to spend money on. He is ready and willing to modernize the shop. I was hoping for ideas more along the lines of if you build more than X units of cabinets a year you would make more money with a CNC, if you make less units than that keep cutting parts manually. These are the industry best practice ideas I was looking for.

Perhaps I equipment manufactures would be a good place to start even though their numbers may be a bit sugar coated.

Pat, making sure the owner and/or his son go to a show like AWFS would go a long way to communicating to them what is even possible with modern machinery.

The threshold for when a CNC is more profitable is surprisingly low, I won't rehash all the arguments, there are plenty of threads that address this issue. But if it were me and I had space or financial constraints, I would go for an edgebander first. It will take a process that takes hours to do by hand and change that into minutes, so I would consider that to be the lowest hanging fruit. If you have the space and money for both, locating the CNC near the bander will allow the CNC operator to band while the router runs patterns. Best of luck to you, and I hope 2021 treats us all better than 2020 did...

The closer for me was considering the machinery payment compared to the wages of my lowest paid guy per month

Mark,
Where are you? I am retiring in mid 2021 and have everything you need, all top of the line and in 100% working order. Id like to sell the casework cell as a unit and be done with it outside a auction.

If your owner is ready to invest simply have them do the math and give you a budget to work within or at least give you some input with regards to what they would be willing to invest if you can drive up production by xxx amount. The bander (even an inexpensive used machine) is a no brainer as Pat said. You can snatch a sub 5K bander that will light the shop on fire and most likely make the staff over them moon with joy. You can bump your budget numbers from there depending on what type of banding and the volume. If your constantly swapping banding thicknesses, beveling, rounding, scraping, I would increase your bander budget by 4-5x that number easily.

As Pat also states, if you have steady volume through the shop the CNC is a no brainer as well but you may likely wind up trading a few bodies you have now for the money to cover the machine, software, and someone to run the software.

Beyond that to me at least its all about what kind of work you do. Case clamps, boring, on down the line.

“Currently the practice is cut parts on the slider, assemble the carcass, then measure those for doors and drawers.”

If I was in your situation, I would start with software. There are a lot out there that are scalable. One that could produce cultist so your not measuring a box to see what size drawer and door your building but with the idea that in future will be going to CNC. My assumption is that your volume is quite low with these business practices. I would skip the panel saw and go right to nested base with a quality machine. You will find that in the time you are measuring your box trying to determine what size your doors should be, a CNC will kick out a complete sheet of ready to eb and assemble cabinet parts.
Be careful on used edgebanders they are the most complicated machine in a shop and can be very frustrating. New with factory setup and support and warranty has a lot of value

I have a small commercial shop, a pathway to a full size edgebander is the Festool Conturo.

I've had pretty good luck with it for putting together standard commercial cabinetry, if you are using PVC banding you can get really fast trimming it with the manual trimming and end cut-off tools.

It has been very handy for banding curves on laminate tops. I've even taken it out on installs a few times when we had to cut slab doors into dutch doors or do other modifications, it was cleaner to edgeband with it than to bust out the contact cement.

With the right software and cnc you could be cutting Plam tops, casework and corian tops.

The bander with corner round and an automated doweller wouldn’t hurt

15hp rotary screw and 15 hp dust.

Low hanging fruit is software 1st and supervision that the cutting is kept to the paperwork

A cnc and edgebander are the 2 best machines to have in a modern cabinet shop. If you are still measuring cabinet openings by hand it seems there is no design and cutlist software in place. If you can not run a good design and cutlist program a cnc is useless. You can spend a million dollars on a cnc but it won't run unless you can send all of the correct information and make it do all the aspects it can do to improve your shop. I don't think a cnc is worth it if you are only cutting box parts and not drilling shelf holes, runner screw holes, hinge plate holes, blind dados ext. We can cut 40 plus sheets a day and assemble a 3 drawer base with runners installed in less than 10 minutes. We went from 10 in the shop to 7 in the first year and turned out more work and a better product. Get a good software I recommend Mozaik it is worth a lot more than it cost. Learn how to use it the very best you can and get everything out of it. It takes a while to get it setup to how you build cabinets but it saves tons of shop time once you do. The optimization is well worth the extra $25 a month if you are cutting on a slider. It shows you exactly how to cut your sheets for the best yield. Once you learn how to use the software good then look into a cnc.

The best thing you can do is find another job. If that shop is that far outdated there is an underlying reason.