Kitchen design software is software in which a showroom or a furniture maker designs a kitchen with the customer, prices it and sends the order to the factory. The same kind of software is used for bathrooms, wardrobes and other furniture made from standard units. Kitchen makers and showrooms around the world use it, including India's modular kitchen showrooms.
A modular kitchen is built from standard units, such as a 600 mm base cabinet or a 900 mm corner unit. Each maker has its own range of units, finishes and handles. The software holds that range as a catalogue, together with the rules for how the units can be combined. The catalogue is often prepared from the maker's product lifecycle management (PLM) system, where its products are designed and recorded.
Consider a modular kitchen showroom in Hyderabad. A customer brings the plan of an L-shaped kitchen, 3 metres along one wall and 2.4 metres along the other. The designer enters the walls, the window, and the positions of the water and gas points. Then she drags units from the catalogue onto the plan. The software warns her when a unit blocks the window or leaves a 40 mm gap at a corner, and it suggests a filler panel for the gap. It shows the customer a 3D picture of the kitchen in the chosen finish. The price updates with every change. With a tall unit for the oven and a quartz countertop, it comes to ₹3.6 lakh, including GST.
When the customer pays the booking amount, the software produces the factory order. It lists all 52 panels, with their sizes, the holes to drill and the edges to cover, together with the hinges, drawer channels and handles. The factory's CNC machines read this list and cut the panels. Counting every panel and fitting from the design is a form of quantity takeoff.
Why not use general drawing software? A computer-aided design (CAD) program can draw any kitchen, but it does not know the maker's units, prices or factory rules. Kitchen design software works only with units that the factory can actually make. So the design that the customer approves is the same design that the factory builds.
Pricing a product that the customer puts together from options is also the job of configure, price, quote (CPQ) software, which companies use for machines and industrial products. Kitchen design software adds the 3D drawing of the room. Interior design platforms use kitchen design tools as one part of a whole-home design.