UK’s Largest Timber Manufacturer Partners with Brainpool AI to Build an AI-powered Timber Design Software, DAISY AI

Staircraft was inundated by requests for timber floor designs and quotes each week, all demanding fast turn-around. This fast-moving sales and complex design process had a significant bottleneck: Staircraft’s capacity to provide floor designs and quotes to new customers was limited by the amount of designers. On a good day, an experienced designer could produce 2-3 designs. But high demand and the inability to produce the most efficient designs resulted in lost opportunities and revenue.

Overcoming this operational and growth bottleneck to align floor and stair design productivity without automation would mean tripling Staircraft’s design team. This wasn’t practical or ideal for many reasons:

• Talent shortage – it’s hard to attract qualified designers who are happy to stay designers long-term, meaning staff turn around
• Efficiency plateau: human designers might produce effective designs, but this doesn’t mean they are always efficient: resulting in wasted materials, inflated costs and environmental impact.
• Limited productivity: there’s only so many designs that even an expert designer can produce in a day

These factors limited Staircraft’s growth and highlighted the need for an automated and scalable solution. Staircraft chose to combine their expertise in construction with Brainpool’s expertise in AI to develop an AI-driven solution that could help overcome this productivity, efficiency, and growth obstacle.

That solution is Daisy.

The first step in solving the problem using AI was for Brainpool to complete a scoping programme to understand what AI solution domains were best suited to the constraints of the challenge, particularly the need to produce fully compliant designs. Brainpool recognized early this was not a trivial challenge: a single rectangular floor plan has approximately 50,000 possible design combinations and design complexity can increase drastically for floors with design considerations such as pillars, staircases, or non-rectangular layouts. The goal for a proof of concept (PoC) was to build a solution able to produce valid designs in under an hour for basic designs, before progressing onto more complex designs.

Once it was demonstrated DAISY was able to generate optimized designs quickly and consistently, the next step was to create a web application that provided access to multiple users to generate new designs in under 10 minutes with the click of a button. Dr. Luke Whale, Technical Director of Staircraft Group said "we think Daisy will increase our productivity by about 100% - so we will get twice as many floors designed as we could do with the resources we have."

“We think it will increase our productivity by about 100%, so we will get twice as many floors designed as we could do with the resources we have.” - Says Dr. Luke Whale, Technical Director at Staircraft. DAISY has transformed how Staircraft does business. It enables designers to produce optimal floor layouts faster, reduce costs and the amount of timber used in the same time. AI augments the design team by taking on the more standard and repetitive designs that comprise a significant portion of the workload, allowing designers to focus on more complex design scenarios.

After 2 years in the UK market, DAISY designs 12% of floors in the residential timber housing market. In 2023, Daisy was launched in Canada and is undergoing pilot testing by North American firms. The genetic algorithm at the core of DAISY can be adapted to design stairs, walls, roofs, even entire houses. The DAISY team will continue the improve the platform performance and create new features aligned with industry pain-points, market demand and commercial opportunity.

Learn more at https://daisy.ai/