Furniture manufacturers, interior designers and retailers need to exchange graphics and non/graphics product information, regardless of the Computer Aided Design system used. A wide offer of specialized CAD system for interior design is available on the market, but information cannot be exchange as required. Moreover, there is no complete EDI - Electronic Data Interchange based solution for the furniture industry.

End users are interested in safeguarding their investment (in equipment, training and libraries introduction), and in improving sales of their products. Most manufacturers, interior decorators and retailers consider this difficulty as the main obstacle to making their investment profitable. For that reason they decide to delay the decision, and not to improve information management and related customer services, and wait for the market situation to became clearer.

In addition, the compatibility between product libraries of the different systems, needs to be assessed in order to avoid their problems of information exchange in they day-by-day process.

Development of a common data model for furniture.

Implementation of the required translators for some commercial CAD systems designed for furniture product design and management.

Development of testing and certification methods of commercial CAD products to be funStep model compliants.

Development of a common method for data exchange.

Demonstration of the compatibility of such updated systems working with the designed method in an industrial environment.

Furniture manufacturers and customer

• Compatible systems on the market.
• Investment assurement.
• Control over the own product libraries.
• Customers service improvement.
• Customers error rate reduction and manufacturers faster response.
• Reduction of non-productive workload.
• Electronic commerce will be possible.

Systems suppliers

• Actual market size becomes larger. Increased customer's reliance on CAD products.
• Development resources are applied to development, not third parties libraries introduction.
• A new way to improve the systems: data exchange modules via telecommunications.

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