When our TopSolid trainer was here, he commented that my current Solidworks operator was one of the sharpest students he'd ever trained. We all in this office understand the power of Topsolid, its why I splurged on it in the first place. But the integrated CAD/CAM and the idea that TopSolid would somehow replace Cabinetvision to produce our boxes never materialized. To my knowledge, no solid modeler has gone to the trouble of producing an add-on parametric cabinet box module that can compete with the amount of work that CabinetVision has done. Until that happens, solid modelers are valuable to me only in the kick-ass pictures that they can create. And Solidworks is faster at that than Topsolid.
There once was a shortlived product called Kabnx. It was a solid modeler based on the NX platform, and the developers had the foresight to create "configurators", such as "cabinet configurator" and "countertop configurator", etc. In theory, this would have saved us a lot of programming time. If Topsolid were to do this, with their integrated CAM it would be a slam dunk. But they have not done this, so in the absence of that I still program my boxes with CabinetVision, using the pretty 3D pictures from Solidworks as my guide.
Today's market has shifted. My designer's hand drawings are no longer adequate to present to clients. They want 3D renderings that include perfect representations of their appliances, plumbing fixtures, lighting, tile, pull hardware, seating, etc. In 2008, we would have simply refused. In 2014, this has become a point of contention, and we are having to bow to the pressure. Fortunately, it is also a revenue stream because very few if any designers and architects are willing or able to produce these drawings either. We just got asked this morning to produce drawings for 6 more whole house packages where the combined cabinet packages will exceed $1,000,000. We will be paid approximately $12,000 for this design work, but more importantly we will be in the drivers seat to land these jobs, where in 2008 we would have been just 1 of 3 or 4 qualified shops simply offering bids. I expect by the end of the year I'll need at least another CAD jockey to meet demand, partly because the manufacturing volume is there, but also partly because our design work has become a product in and of itself.
Derek