Rendering images in CET Designer is a critical feature of the application as a selling, co-design and marketing tool for dealerships wish to realize the full benefit of their paid license for the software. Commercial furniture dealer / workspace service companies typically equip their designers with laptops allowing them to work anywhere to provide the best client engagements possible. However, due to the power and cooling constraints typical in laptops, the equipment they are issued is not well suited to the task of rendering images in CET Designer. As a result, a significant amount of design labor is lost every year due to the mismatch between the equipment designers use and the unique hardware requirements for image rendering in CET Designer. A typical group of 10-20 renderings for a bid package can easily take an hour or more to complete even on the fastest laptops available, which also makes the designer’s laptop effectively unusable for other tasks while it runs.
This has a number of productivity consequences:
- Designers lose the use of their laptop during rendering operations meaning they have to do lower value work or be equipped with a second computer or laptop while theirs is busy.
- Many designers have resorted to doing rendering work after hours only and from home when it won’t disrupt their ability to work during the day, impacting their personal time negatively.
- Dealerships have stated to utilize paid outsourcing rendering services or tools at a per-drawing or monthly cost in addition to the CET Designer licensing costs.
- Slow laptop rendering speeds makes it difficult to include real-time renderings during co-design sessions or short notice sales presentation requests limiting the impact this could have on NBD.
Configura has made the “render accelerator” extension available for CET free for all users, but no turkey solution has existed to leverage this capability to supplement dealers running laptops at an affordable price point and without capacity limitations or recurring subscription fees, until now.
Plaid Anvil Consulting has gone through a painstaking process to design and test numerous hardware + software combinations to arrive at a high performance, moderately priced dedicated rendering hardware solution for CET Designer users. The solution has been deployed to dealerships on both coasts and in the Midwest to confirm that the product delivers and maintains the expected performance improvements over time in a full “production” environment. Designers at these dealerships have used the term “game changing” in response to the the work process improvements this resource provided them, in addition to the straight time savings due to faster rendering times (typically a reduction in render times of 10x). Due to some very specific hardware compatibility considerations and a lack of affordable pre-built computers with the cooling capacity to do sustained rendering work, this is not a hardware solution that most dealer IT teams would be able to purchase off the shelf or build and deploy cost effectively at small scale.
The solution costs between $4000 – $6000 + actual shipping costs for a 2-node fully assembled and ready to install solution including custom integration services to assist your IT team in getting it up and running quickly. There is an optional $1000 per year maintenance agreement available to cover ongoing service and support costs, if desired. There are no limits on how many rendering jobs you can perform, or other usage costs associated with this solution unless Configura begins charging for the Render Accelerator extension. Beyond the initial purchase, this solution has a very minimal IT budgetary or maintenance footprint.
Based on a conservative estimate of 1 hour saved (2-3 is typical) per designer per week on a team of 10 designers billing $75/hour for their time, the annual value of the labor saved would be $36,000, or more. In the typical 3-year lifespan of an IT investment you’d be looking at a payback of over $100,000 in billable design hours at a cost of only 5-10% of the amount saved inclusive of shipping and 2 years of optional maintenance. Depending on the number of designers the typical ROI payback is less than 3 months.
Contact Jason at 612.310.0467 if you’d like to discuss purchasing this solution for your dealership!