NC Programs at the Push of a Button

Time savings of up to 80 percent thanks to automated CAM programming

Marco Bauer, Managing Director of MAB GmbH headquartered in the German town of Weiden is certain that no manufacturing company will survive over the long term without digitization and automation. He, therefore, implemented a process landscape that is consistently digital and automated, from the online shop to the company’s robot-assisted production cells. A key component of this highly efficient system is automated CAM programming using hyperMILL^®, which MAB introduced together with CAD/CAM partner OPEN MIND.

Ordered today, delivered tomorrow – in our private lives, we take this level of service for granted. And at the workplace? There, we are used to waiting for weeks. Of course, individual components and assemblies that need to be manufactured according to construction drawings take a little longer. However, in the age of digitization and Industry 4.0, it is possible to accelerate many processes and make them more flexible.

Managing Director of MAB GmbH Marco Bauer, who studied business information technology, views digitization and automation as one of the great opportunities of our time. This holds especially true for industrial production. Bauer is convinced that: “due to the new technical possibilities, we have to look at the entire process chain in a completely new way. In this area, we like to think of ourselves as creative pioneers.”

The best example of innovative software solutions is the ‘on-demand manufacturing platform’ known as mipart.com mentioned previously. It not only assures that customers get their orders quickly but MAB, too, benefits from accelerated processes. This is because immediately after an order is placed, the software has already created the entire work plan fully automatically. Following the automated quoting process, the CAM programmers are the first team members to see the order. “Here, too, we are streamlining the automation process together with our supplier OPEN MIND,” stresses Marco Bauer. “After all, we want our NC programs to get to our automated production cells as quickly as possible. In initial projects, we have succeeded in reducing the time and effort required for CAM programming by 70 to 80 percent.”

Feature and Macro Technology – Foundation of Automated CAM Programming

“Thanks to the powerful 2.5D, 3D and 5-axis cycles of hyperMILL, we have succeeded in reducing setup and programming times at the machining centers, resulting in increased efficiency and higher capacity utilization,” states Head of Manufacturing Stefan Bauer. MAB was also able to significantly increase the complexity of its manufacturing portfolio. This is because hyperMILL provides efficient machining strategies for almost any application scenario. As a consequence, what started as a single hyperMILL license has now grown to six – all including 5-axis cycles and the roughing and finishing modules of the hyperMILL MAXX Machining performance package.
Stefan Bauer and his production team – which features a higher proportion of female colleagues than is normally seen in this industry – appreciate the fact that OPEN MIND is constantly evolving the software by introducing innovative strategies and processes. “With its feature technology and associated process and macro databases, hyperMILL also provides a solid basis for automating programming and significantly reducing programming times by reusing pre-existing programming know-how,” adds Stefan Bauer.

Individual Automation

Managing Director Marco Bauer, too, emphasizes the consistently excellent cooperation with OPEN MIND – from sales and service through to the project teams that worked on custom automation solutions: “The competent OPEN MIND contacts always provide us with expert support, even when dealing with highly complex applications and exotic projects. One of the decisive factors for us was that OPEN MIND develops its software in-house. As a result, we were able to obtain customized functions for our automation projects very rapidly, which has helped us improve by leaps and bounds.”
Rico Müller, Project Manager CAD/CAM Automation at OPEN MIND, confirms the intensive and highly cooperative collaboration. With regard to fully automated programming, he explains: “This works particularly well for component assemblies that have a similar structure and require similar machining strategies. Since MAB produces a rather large number of component variants, we have built an interactive user guide into our automation system. Now, our CAM programmers only need to set a few parameters to increase the range of components and significantly reduce the overall programming work.”

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