How to Automate Cabinet Vision

The drawing is not a picture of the cabinet, it is the cabinet

In a cabinet shop the model is the product. A designer builds the room on screen, and that same model produces the customer's rendering, the shop drawings, the material list, the cut list and the code that runs the router. Change a stile width and every one of those changes with it.

Cabinet Vision is where that happens, for cabinet, closet and casegoods makers, and most shops just call it Solid after the packages. It belongs to Hexagon, which acquired it in 2014 when it bought Vero Software, the company that had gathered it in with Alphacam three years earlier.

That single source is the whole value and also the exposure. Everything downstream is only as right as the model, and the model was right on the morning it was drawn.

A kitchen gets measured once and then keeps moving

What happens after a design is signed off is that the building quietly stops matching it.

The site was measured before drywall, and the finished opening comes in three quarters of an inch narrow. The builder changed the appliance package and mentioned it in a text message. The homeowner picked a different door style at the showroom on a Saturday. A revised drawing goes up on the general contractor's project portal, where it sits until somebody thinks to look.

Meanwhile the material the model assumes has a life of its own. Prefinished maple ply is on allocation, banding to match a discontinued colour is six weeks out, and the hinge specified has been superseded. All of that sits on a distributor's dealer site behind a login, and none of it is in the job.

So somebody opens portals between other tasks and compares them with a folder, which is how a job gets cut perfectly to a drawing that stopped being true in March.

Cabinet Vision

Sheet goods confirmed before the nest runs Panel, edgebanding and hardware stock read on the distributor's own site, so a substitution is a decision rather than a discovery at the saw.

Change orders that reach the shop in time Builder and contractor portals watched for revised drawings and approvals, so a door style change lands before the parts are cut.

Installs booked against a site that is ready Project schedules and field notes gathered ahead of the crew, so a truck is not loaded for a kitchen that still has no floor.

Screen-To-Machine ends at the machine

Inside its own boundary Cabinet Vision does an enormous amount, and a shop should exhaust that before adding anything beside it.

The packages run from Solid Essential up through Solid Advanced and Solid Ultimate, with closet and drafting variants, and Core Cabinets underneath producing shop floor information from the same on-screen model. Screen-To-Machine, through xMachining and the S2M Center, analyses part geometry and writes machine ready G-code for routers, point-to-point machines, panel saws, drill and dowel machines, chop saws and edgebanders, choosing the tool and the feed rates itself, and where a shop runs several machine types it sends the right part to the right machine. xOptimizer turns a cut list into patterns that use less sheet. xBidding generates the bid data behind a price you can defend. xReporting ships well over a hundred reports with an editor for the rest.

Every one of those reasons from the job file. That is precisely why the software is worth what it costs, and precisely why nothing in it can notice that the opening on site is now narrower than the cabinet it just posted to the router.

The site can report back before the sheet is cut

Suppose the job folder could go and check itself against the world it was drawn from.

Sheet goods, banding and hardware read on the distributor's dealer site for every job about to be nested: is the prefinished ply in stock, in this thickness, at this branch, and has the banding to match it been discontinued. A substitution decided on Monday is a phone call. The same substitution found at the saw on Thursday is a rework.

The builder's project portal read for what nobody forwards: a revised drawing, an approved change order, a punch list item with your name on it, a delivery date that moved out three weeks. Field notes and site photographs gathered before an install crew is dispatched, so a truck is not loaded for a kitchen with no floor in it.

Prices set against the ones xBidding is costing from, because a shop bidding on last spring's sheet price gives margin away by the sheet. Warranty callbacks and homeowner messages pulled into one list, so a door that needs adjusting is booked with the next install in that suburb rather than becoming its own trip.

A posted cut list cannot be taken back

Once parts are on the router the checking is too late, which argues for a fixed time each morning.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the panel distributor, the contractor's project site or the hardware supplier, reads the screen, and turns it into what you wanted: the jobs whose material is at risk, the change orders nobody saw, the installs that should move.

No integration has to exist first, which matters when the other end is a regional distributor whose portal was built a decade ago. It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, you can watch a run and stop it, and anything going to a builder or a homeowner is drafted and waits.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names the sites it opens.