LOUIS, the Toulouse startup that revolutionizes digital manufacturing - Success Story #1
Who is LOUIS ?
LOUIS is a young French startup created in 2018 by Thomas, Paul, Baulieu and Guillaume. It designs and manufactures eco-responsible wooden office furniture, custom-made and made in Toulouse in a sustainable approach.
Since its creation, LOUIS has grown by 150% and continues to innovate in order to simplify and automate its production processes while promoting French craftsmanship !
Somehow, LOUIS combines the quality and customization of a cabinetmaker with the price range of a quality supplier. In the history of LOUIS, a very strong problem quickly appeared:
How to produce custom-made products with the efficiency of mass production?
State of play
Two years ago, all the digital preparation of the machining was done manually. Each hole, bore, pocket, mortise, and tenon was subject to several manipulations in a standard CAM tool.
"The majority of our parts are cut from birch plywood sheets with our CNC machine. "
In addition to requiring a full-time person, we estimated that preparing for a day's machining required more than 2,000 clicks to set up the toolpath. Humans have a very high error rate when faced with a large number of repetitive operations, in our case over 1 in 500. From a quality standpoint, this meant errors to deal with. EVERY. DAY. Just on the machining preparation part.
"We took the plunge 12 months ago and decided to implement a fully automatic machining generation system. After an initial in-house experiment where we understood where the right balance between automation and human control lay, we turned to NX via the JANUS team to build this revolutionary system. "
Why choose NX and Janus?
NX for reliability and flexibility
At the NX level, LOUIS' pattern recognition system called MKE is close to magic. From a single example shape, it is able to recognize any other similar shape even if it has radically different dimensions. On top of that, you only have to define the tool path once on the example shape, and it automatically adapts to the actual shapes during machining !
Even if tomorrow parts with similar shapes but longer, wider, etc. are to be produced, the tool path automatically adapts.
"This simply amazing system proved to be very robust and we were able to finely segment the shapes and machine them in the best possible way."
And finally, the ability to automate the behavior of NX via Python programs made it possible to implement absolutely everything LOUIS needed. EVERYTHING.
Whether it be automatic chamfer detection, automatic re-scheduling of machining operations, determination of optimal material entry points, etc. we went far beyond the initial specifications in just a few months!
"Our next goal: Make our machining data-driven with NX and optimize toolpaths to achieve the maximum from our CNC."
Janus Engineering for expertise and proximity
In three words "Why the choice of NX and JANUS?"
- People skills
- Pattern recognition
- Python
"The Janus Engineering team has always been present and hyper competent to help us set up this complex system whether it be for demonstrations, responsiveness or technical support."
With this project it is a first big step that the Toulouse-based strat-up has passed and this is only a small part of the benefits brought by the NX solution and the expertise of our teams.
In the next article dedicated to NX + PYTHON, you will discover how to intelligently reduce its environmental impact while reducing manufacturing costs by creating an automatic and flexible workflow !