OCTOBER - 20198 MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY INSIGHTSBy Carol Zampell, Vice President, Software Engineering, 3D SystemsAs technology has become an integral part of our lives ­ both personal and professional ­ it has transformed the way we operate. Many things move faster and at a lower cost, such as information flow, digital content, and physical goods. Software is a core part of this transformation, and the number of software development engineers worldwide is overgrowing. Among this number are a smaller group who find their passion in creating software to simplify sophisticated product design, take work out of the tooling process, and generally use technology to speed and simplify the task of toolmakers.Changing the Tool Making Paradigm with Integrated CAD/CAM SoftwareTo stay competitive, mold makers need to shorten delivery time while producing high-quality molds at a lower cost. Design and Manufacturing Engineers often must work with processes that require a product and tool design be passed between multiple software packages. Any workflow that involves the use of numerous software packages has inherent inefficiency and loss of quality. Having a dedicated, integrated CAD/CAM solution for the design and manufacture of molds, dies, and tools enable toolmakers to increase their productivity and deliver high-quality tools of any complexity and size in record time. Add to that a range of dedicated quoting, tooling design and analysis tools, as well as automated NC programming, and tooling departments can dramatically increase their competitiveness and profitability. A typical company may see more than 50 percent improvement in design time and up to 70 percent improvement in total mold delivery time achieved through the adoption of a fully integrated software solution.Liberty Molds, Inc, an injection mold-making tool shop in Portage, MI is using integrated CAD/CAM software to design and manufacture complex, high-tolerance, custom prototype and production tooling. The shop was challenged to design and build complex molds quickly to meet tight delivery timelines their customers demanded. They were using three different software solutions which were cumbersome. It was slow to train their employees on each one; errors were numerous and costly, requiring re-work that resulted in slowdowns across the process. By replacing these three solutions with a single, integrated CAD/CAM system, they cut mold design times in half, eliminated translation errors, resulting in hundreds of hours saved on re-work per Integrated CAD/CAM Software Inspired by the Needs of Tooling EngineersIN MY OPINION
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