Girsberger simulates and optimizes wood cutting operations offline using a digital twin

Switzerland's high labor and infrastructure costs create relentless pressure on furniture manufacturers to maximize machine efficiency. Girsberger AG, a premium Swiss furniture maker established in 1889, produces seating and tables with complex curves and freeform geometries — shapes that demand precise CNC programming. Since 2007, the company has operated a large gantry machining center for wood cutting, but without a complete 3D model of that machine, engineers had no way to verify NC programs before running them on physical equipment. The result: collision risk, failed cuts, and unproductive machine occupation time — direct costs that eroded competitiveness in a premium consumer goods market where craftsmanship and cost discipline must coexist.

Girsberger implemented Siemens NX CAM with a custom postprocessor tailored to their NC wood machining workflows. The foundational challenge was that no complete 3D model of their CNC gantry machine existed. Rather than accept that constraint, Girsberger's engineering team constructed a full machine representation inside NX, building an accurate digital twin of the machining center from the ground up. With this virtual model in place, engineers can now simulate and optimize all wood cutting operations entirely offline before committing any physical machine time. The custom postprocessor ensures NC code generated in NX translates precisely to the machine's control system, creating an integrated path from design through verified cutting program within a single environment.

By shifting NC program verification to an offline digital twin environment, Girsberger eliminated a significant source of unproductive machine time and operational risk. Key outcomes include:

• Collision avoidance handled entirely in simulation — before any physical run, removing the risk of machine damage on complex freeform toolpaths
• Reduced unsuccessful cutting attempts, freeing physical machine capacity for productive work
• Recovered machine occupation time previously lost to on-machine trial-and-error cycles

No specific time or cost figures were published, but in Switzerland's high-cost manufacturing environment, each avoided hour of machine downtime carries outsized financial impact.

• When a complete 3D machine model doesn't exist, building one inside CAM software is a practical path to digital twin capability — the modeling investment pays back through eliminated physical trial runs.
• For furniture manufacturers working with freeform geometries, offline NC simulation is especially high-value: compound curves multiply collision risk in ways flat-part machining doesn't face.
• Custom postprocessors are essential to simulation accuracy — without machine-specific output, virtual results won't reliably predict physical behavior.
• In high labor-cost countries, machine efficiency improvements carry disproportionate ROI, making the business case for digital twin tooling easier to justify than in lower-cost environments.