Developing a furniture test machine according to national standards : Ensuring quality and credibility for the SMEEs in South Africa

Sammanfattning: In South Africa, where the unemployment rate is immense, Small Micro and Medium Enterprises (SMMEs) provide most of the employment opportunities. But statistics show that a lot of these enterprises fail during their first years of operation. Furntech is an organisation that works within business incubation and skills development for SMMEs in the furniture manufacturing sector in South Africa. Furntech is working on getting an accredited testing laboratory that conforms to South African standards as another service for the SMMEs. The aim of this project is to develop a machine design to test innerspring mattresses that meets the local standards within the bedding industry in South Africa. A field study is conducted to gather information by observations, interviews, and by visiting local manufacturing companies. This is done to fully understand the layout of the actual laboratory and what is required of the machine from a user point of view and mechanical point of view. The design of the machine is developed according to product development methodology and evaluated against demands that are compiled in a requirement specification.  A design is produced by developing the existing table test machine in Furntech’s laboratory and is presented in a CAD-model. Existing and required additional parts to support the functionality for the test bedding machine has been evaluated by calculations and simulations by using for example ABAQUS and JACK. Instruction manuals combined with an interface design have been produced, where both of them are connected to a flowchart to understand what is required from the machine, the user, and the programmer.