iFurn is a service provider for companies in the furniture supply industry. iFurn creates digital data from real articles, which can be used especially in the environment of CAD software systems.
Interview with Dirk Löckener, Sales Manager at iFurn.
Easy Engineering: What are the main activities of the company?
Dirk Löckener: The core target group of iFurn are fitting suppliers. iFurn offers them digital data that designers can insert directly into their CAD program and use practically: iFurn supplements their real articles with machining information. In this way, we enable, support and optimize the digital workflow throughout the entire production process.
E.E: What’s new about new products?
D.L: We have a new product since October 2021: the iFurn Composer with the new output format anyCAD. With this tool, all designers can configure fitting situations themselves – independent of software – on our website ifurn.net. This means that every designer can determine data and then use it in his own software environment.
To do this, the designer only has to go through the Composer’s query points and then receives resilient data in the form of a parts list including CAD data in the desired format. This set of fittings, which has been specially formed in response to the query, can be requested in 30 different data formats for any common CAD software and transferred to the design with pinpoint accuracy using the positioning aid.
E.E: What are the product ranges?
D.L: The central product of iFurn is the service in the sense of data preparation and data management. This is then used via various tools and channels: the iFurn Composer just mentioned, and also via the online platform DataBroker, via which fittings can be downloaded in various forms – here iFurn offers individual data on fittings, complete fittings catalogs and individually configured fittings sets. The Your iFurn application offers manufacturers the possibility to offer their data prepared by iFurn on their own website.
E.E: What is the current status of the market in which you are active?
D.L: Although it is often generally described that the furniture industry is already working at the Digital 4.0 level, we at iFurn believe that there is still no continuity of digital data from the supplier to the furniture producer to the end customer.
E.E: What can you tell us about market trends?
D.L: In our environment, the desire of many suppliers is that their items already generate an order from the CAD systems.
E.E: What are the most innovative products that are marketed?
D.L: All our products are innovative. To single out one of them would not do justice to the other products. It always depends on what benefit the user wants. Accordingly, it is of course also innovative to download a complete supplier catalog into one’s organizational system without having to do anything else.
I would like to put it differently: iFurn offers the highest level of service with the Composer in anyCAD format. With a configured fitting, the designer saves an enormous amount of time and still receives reliable data, which he can then even pass on digitally in his environment without having to perform any further manual activities. This is service at the highest level, including the strong security of using the products as specified by the supplier!
E.E: What are your estimates for 2022?
D.L: Two years of Corona are behind us. However, many effects of the pandemic are well integrated again in the implementation of the daily work. We think that the uncertainty that Corona brought with it has now been overcome. What impact in the future the war in Ukraine will bring? That is of course a question. Regardless of any situation that comes, we will continue to work on the digital alignment of the furniture industry’s supplier data in order to integrate it even better and deeper into the entire furniture industry process.