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The Full Package at Chervin Kitchen & Bath
From the initial Cabnetware movement, to 35 Cabinet Vision Licenses and VORTEK Spaces, our story with Chervin Kitchen & Bath goes way back when.
There’s a special atmosphere when you walk into Chervin Kitchen & Bath. The team visibly pride themselves in their impressive customer service, top quality products and a carefully crafted culture nurtured over many years. On display throughout their lobby are the words The Golden Means of Perfection, in which they vow to treat their customers the way they themselves would want to be treated. This is a company that takes extra steps to meet their customers’ expectations, every single time.
Chervin Kitchen & Bath is a big part of Planit Canada’s story. Our partnership with Chervin is one of our longest standing. Since 2005, we have implemented 35 Cabinet Vision licenses in their shops, fuelled their desire for automation and helped them take their design process to the next level. We’ve worked together through solving puzzles and upgrading software, and they have surely taught us a lot about who we are and what we stand for as a company. It’s been inspiring to see how Chervin has used our products to innovate, increase productivity and finesse their product quality while pushing their machines to their limits. It’s no surprise they are competitive in their market; they have made some very impressive growth over the years.
Just a few months ago, we sat down with members of the Chervin family to get the low-down on their company culture, their use of Cabinet Vision over the years, the addition of VORTEK Spaces into their sales process. We also discussed what the future holds for Chervin and their ongoing journey to improve and streamline their manufacturing processes.
PLANIT CANADA – The Full Package at Chervin Kitchen & Bath Video
The Golden Means of Perfection and Beyond
We first sat down with Jon Staken, Director of Sales and Design at Chervin for 23 years, who explained the principle of The Golden Means of Perfection; a combination of the golden rule and the mathematical principle of the golden ratio.
The Golden Rule is the simple but powerful pledge to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Jon explained how, as a team, they always strive to be the very best they can be, and this truly does translate into everything that they do; from design, to manufacturing, to installation and customer service.
They have married that mission with the golden ratio; recognized by artists and architects for its aesthetically pleasing proportion and seen in nature in the repeating patterns of leaves and plants, or in the mesmerizing spirals of a nautilus shell. It is this structure and beauty that informs their design.
The Journey to Cabinet Vision
Our relationship with Chervin Kitchen & Bath started in 2005 when they ran Cabnetware with Planit Solutions. Over the years, the company evolved and grew to 35 Cabinet Vision Licenses. Today, they are running CV modules Solid Ultimate and S2M Ultimate; the highest level of Cabinet Vision including all of its features. Jon reminisced about the times way back when, where they would draw the cabinets out with pencils and rulers to draw them to scale, without any room for error. They couldn’t design, alter or revise cabinet shapes and sizes within the software, but this quickly changed when they integrated the software. Cabnetware was of course a huge level up, but Cabinet Vision simply took it to a whole other level.
It didn’t take long with Cabinet Vision until you realize how powerful that program was compared to what we have been using.
– Jon Staken, Director of Sales and Design, Chervin Kitchen & Bath
Jon explained how the software’s potential was realized early on in the integration process; they could design, alter or revise cabinet shapes and sizes right within the software, something that they had never experienced before. Their new and more efficient process involved getting the right people in place in order to manage certain parts of the program. For example, having a staff member regularly updating the program speeds up the entire process for the other teams down the line.
They ensure that they have a staff member who, as part of their role, oversees any updating. Having someone on deck to make sure that updates are done regularly has been a game changer. They catalog custom cabinetry in the program, speeding things up all the way down the line for their engineers and their preliminary team.
The beauty of Cabinet Vision again, each cabinet company can customize in a lot of ways how they do their cabinetry.
– Jon Staken, Director of Sales and Design, Chervin Kitchen & Bath
In discussing the power of the software with Kenneth Jantzi, Chervin Kitchen and Bath’s Engineering Development, we learned that the increasing demand for custom cabinets brought the risk of reduced efficiency and increased time spent communicating with staff on the shop floor. Thanks to Cabinet Vision features like custom material schedules, they’ve been able to stay on track and maximize efficiency. With everything set up in the software, there is very little need for intervention on the shop floor.
We’ve integrated Cabinet Vision with our CNC routers, and that has greatly improved the yield that we can get from our sheets of plywood.
–Kenneth Jantzi, Engineering Development, Chervin Kitchen & Bath
35 Cabinet Vision licenses and many years later, both Jon and Kenneth had nothing but impressive statements about how employees interact with the software, how it has improved manufacturing, and how it has enabled the company to expand.
Forever Blown Away by VORTEK Spaces
The Chervin team were thrilled to share how seamlessly VORTEK Spaces and Cabinet Vision integrate to make the project run so smoothly from design, to sale, to satisfied customer.
Using it as our rendering machine, we can export our drive from Cabinet Vision to VORTEK and within VORTEK we can apply different textures to the countertops, make the cabinets a different colour. Then we take the renders from VORTEK and bring it back to Cabinet Vision to provide the final package.
–Kenneth Jantzi, Engineering Development, Chervin Kitchen & Bath
Chervin Kitchen & Bath has been on the VORTEK bandwagon for over three years now, and they had nothing but positive things to share about their experience with the rendering program.
VORTEK Spaces allows clients to envision their space and feel right at home in it. The ability to change colors, materials and finishes on the fly means that new, realistic renders are created almost instantly. With the vast furniture and décor library, they can quickly finish a room without bogging down their project with heavy SketchUp files. While the rendering program within Cabinet Vision is far better than what they’d had before, Jon explains that “VORTEK just took it to a whole other level.”
Jon explains that all the engineering information remains on the back end, already converted for manufacturing. You don’t have to go the extra step to convert it from one program to the other; it’s already done for you.
It has it all in one package.
–Jon Staken, Director of Sales and Design, Chervin Kitchen & Bath
What’s Next for Chervin Kitchen & Bath
We inquired about what’s next for the company, how they plan on solving new problems and what they’ll do to take their business processes to the next level. We spoke of the challenge of maintaining a consistent group of employees who will be there every single day. They are looking at further automating, by bringing in an ERP and MES in the near future, in order to maintain a steady and efficient production line.
I dream of going paperless.
–Jon Staken, Director of Sales and Design, Chervin Kitchen & Bath
Paul Martin, the Production Innovation Manager, shared that they are spending a lot of time double-checking and printing paper, resulting in wasted time looking for information and searching multiple locations. They are considering WEB-CAB, the MES software that will allow them to track parts and achieve the paperless dream.
We’re opening ourselves up to go from small shop mentality to big shop mentality…
–Paul Martin, Production Innovation Manager, Chervin Kitchen & Bath
About Chervin Kitchen & Bath Inc.
Since 1991, Chervin Kitchen & Bath has been designing, manufacturing, and installing high quality custom cabinetry in homes across Waterloo Region, Muskoka, and GTA and is part of a group of the Chervin companies that include Chervin Furniture & Design, Artco, and Vogel by Chervin.
- Shop Size: 65,000 SQFT
- Number of Employees: 150+
- Software used: Cabinet Vision Solid Ultimate, S2M Ultimate, VORTEK Spaces
For more information about Chervin Kitchen & Bath, please visit their website at https://www.chervin.ca/site/home.
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