How HOMAG chose Cadran to digitalize woodworking
This is the story of how a strategic partnership becomes a partnership of three live products.
Not a vendor relationship. A Co-Development partnership.
In mid-2022, HOMAG Group and Cadran formed a strategic partnership. Not a staffing arrangement. A genuine co-development relationship where Cadran engineers work as an embedded extension of HOMAG’s product team.
HOMAG brings 60+ years of woodworking machinery expertise, a global customer base, and deep domain knowledge of how production workshops operate. Cadran brings full-stack engineering, cloud-native architecture, automated quality assurance, and the agility of a focused team that ships production code every sprint.
Over three-plus years, that partnership has produced three purpose-built products: materialManager and materialManager Advanced (material management at the machine level) and HOMAG INTELLIGENCE (the unifying platform connecting sales, design, and production). Each product solves a different problem. Together, they form the digital backbone of modern furniture manufacturing.
Digitalizing furniture manufacturing isn’t one problem. It’s three.
Digitalizing furniture manufacturing requires solving challenges at three distinct levels:
Machine level: Managing growing material complexity, including panels, edgebands, and offcuts.
Production level: Ensuring correct machine parameters and sequences to prevent rework and waste.
Enterprise level: Connecting sales and design to production and delivery across a vast ecosystem.
HOMAG partnered with Cadran to build a unified architecture that addresses all three levels, scaling from single machines to complex networks.
The platform that unifies everything
HOMAG turned to Cadran specifically to co-develop the intelligent design library system at the core of Intelligence. Our team built the flexible architecture behind these predefined libraries, the system that enables tested furniture construction rules to integrate directly into the process.
What HOMAG Intelligence delivers:
Streamlines end-to-end data flow from sales to production without manual handoffs.
Eliminates duplication with centralized access and automatic updates.
Error-free configuration via co-developed libraries and tested components.
Manages complex production across internal and external networks.
Integrates with existing third-party systems through open interfaces.
Enables low-risk expansion through cloud modules.
Real-time analytics provide a foundation for AI-driven optimization.
Plug-and-play operation ensures quick team onboarding.
materialManager: Centralized Material Platform
materialManager is HOMAG’s web-based application for centralizing material data, inventory, and allocations. It replaces the spreadsheets, local databases, and mental inventories that most workshops rely on with a single, cloud-connected platform.
Core Capabilities:
Consolidates master data from Excel, ERPs, and software into one searchable database.
Tracks panels, edgebands, and offcuts in real-time for immediate operator visibility.
Books materials against inventory automatically upon order release.
Maintains stock levels and optimizes cutting plans to minimize material loss.
Syncs with HOMAG controls for optimized nesting and cutting sequences.
materialManager Advanced: Machine Intelligence
The evolution. materialManager Advanced takes the data foundation and adds machine-level intelligence. Where materialManager tells you what material to use, Advanced tells the machine how to process it.
What it adds:
Automatically configures optimal saw settings based on tools and material, eliminating operator guesswork.
Prevents defects by alerting operators if tools are incompatible with the loaded material.
Provides real-time tracking of tool usage, history, and maintenance needs.
Continuous Build. Continuous Operate. Across three products.
Build
New features, integrations, and performance improvements delivered continuously across all three products. Cadran engineers participate in sprint planning, reviews, and retrospectives. Dual Track Agile (discovery + delivery) used for HOMAG Intelligence to align validation and shipping work.
How it works
Operate
Playwright-driven end-to-end testing, comprehensive unit test coverage, nightly test runs, and automatic regression on merges keep all three platforms stable. Performance monitoring and optimization ensure responsiveness as customer adoption grows. Bug resolution with guaranteed response times.
What it does
What the partnership has delivered
Three years of co-development. Three live products. Measurable impact for HOMAG and their customers:
Waste reduction for end usersthrough automated material allocationand optimized cutting patterns
Live products in production across HOMAG’s global customer base (materialManager + Advanced)
Years of continuous co-development with no interruption and no team turnover.
What Cadran delivered
HOMAG Intelligence shipped on schedule. New features delivered faster across all three products. Time-to-market for customer-requested capabilities shortened significantly.
Each product can evolve independently while integrating with the others. New modules added without rearchitecting the platform. Cloud-native design scales with customer growth.
HOMAG Intelligence’s intelligent design libraries minimize configuration errors and rework by embedding tested rules into the platform’s core. Quality defects prevented at source.
Full compatibility with HOMAG’s internal systems, third-party software, and diverse machine infrastructures through standardized open interfaces. Customers don’t replace — they connect.
Playwright E2E tests, unit tests across all code, nightly runs, and automatic regression checks on every merge. Operational reliability across hundreds of deployments.
Three integrated platforms strengthen HOMAG’s competitive advantage. State-of-the-art digital solutions aligned with evolving industry demands position HOMAG ahead of competitors still selling isolated tools.
High-quality output at controlled costs. Efficient project management. No compromise on engineering standards.
Dynamic scaling across multiple roles ensures the right technical capabilities at each project stage. Specialized expertise in industrial software, systems integration, and modern engineering practices.
Long-term technical maintenance and iterative improvement for all three platforms. Continuous evolution keeps the products competitive as the industry changes.
Our collaboration with Cadran Technologies is built on a long-standing, trusted partnership that has consistently delivered results. Over the years, Cadran has proven to be more than a development partner — they are a strategic extension of our team. Their deep technical knowledge, particularly in industrial software and systems integration, has been instrumental in multiple successful initiatives, including the development of HOMAG Intelligence.
Boris Wehrle
When HOMAG gave us the opportunity to build material Manager, they weren’t just hiring developers. They were choosing a partner who would live inside their product, understand their customers’ production floors, and stake our reputation on software that runs in workshops around the world. Three years later, that decision has grown into three live platforms — materialManager, materialManager Advanced, and now HOMAG Intelligence. Each one taught us something new about building for industry. None of them would have happened without the trust HOMAG extended to us in 2022, and the technical standards they’ve held us to ever since.
Claudiu Abrudan
Beyond materialManager: The HOMAG Group partnership
HOMAG Group includes more than the HOMAG brand. The group encompasses multiple leading manufacturers of woodworking and timber construction machinery. Cadran’s partnership extends beyond materialManager:
materialManager + materialManager Advanced
Full-stack development, QA, cloud infrastructure, ongoing maintenance
Strategic partnership since mid-2022
WupWorks digital production platform for timber construction
Full-stack development, 3D visualization, CAD-to-CNC integration, QA
Ongoing partnership
Two companies within the same group chose Cadran independently. That’s not a coincidence — it’s the result of engineering quality that travels by reputation within an organization. The disciplines are the same: Engineering and Integration applied to manufacturing software. The domain knowledge deepens with every engagement.
Built for production, not for demo day
* Every technology listed is in active production use across one or more of the three HOMAG platforms. The expanded stack — Node.js, Playwright, Dual Track Agile — reflects the maturity that comes with co-developing three production systems over multiple years.
Ready for a partnership that delivers results?
If you’re looking for a technology partner — not a vendor, not a staffing agency, but a partner who stakes their reputation on your results — we’d like to have the conversation.
