We’re honored to have one of our CAMWorks customers, Matt Moseman from DEVELOP LLC, as our guest blogger to talk about his experience with HCL CAMWorks and how it has assisted his work.
In the CNC machining market, hiring and training skilled machinists is difficult because it’s such a specialized job. But as automation becomes a part of the process, it’s clear where the future lies. As with training employees, automation requires an investment in tools and software that will unlock capabilities beyond someone’s experience. Robotic arms, pallet changes, and automatic band saws are of little value for prototyping businesses that are making only a few of each component. That is where CAMWorks becomes a small business owner’s automation asset. For me, CAMWorks was my first employee and my first programmer, especially the function that CAMWorks calls Automatic Feature Recognition.
Like an employee, Automatic Feature Recognition (AFR) requires training until it learns your company, tools, machines, and most importantly, your brand identity. AFR eventually takes programming tasks over. While your clients will never meet AFR, they will see its attention to detail, which are shown in its consistency with quality and process across unique parts, no matter who programmed the part.
My previous experience includes working for a car builder, where I created a process that continues to be used for internal product development. Those proven processes and strategies were the reason I when I started building the manufacturing department at DEVELOP.
As an automation integrator and product development company, DEVELOP sees automation and speed to market as the core of our processes. Integrating in our preferred designing tool, SOLIDWORKS, allows for faster internal product development by removing redundant tasks. For instance, we utilize the existing 3D file in SOLIDWORKS by using Model-Based Definition that shows AFR what tolerances are critical and might need special attention. This becomes extremely powerful during part revisions and all your tool paths update at a click of a button and you are posting that data to the shop floor within minutes of an engineering change order.
At the end of the day, every business decision DEVELOP makes is driven by quality and future scale in mind. This is why tools like CAMWorks have become indispensable for us, and an integral part of both our machining processes and our future.
