Are You Up To Standard?

 

CNC program control is vital to quality control, consistent production standards and, ultimately, to business continuity.

It is not enough to back up the programs from the machines and simply overwrite the old version.  More and more engineering customers and auditors are asking for a program revision history with full traceability.  Indeed the latest Aerospace AS9100 Rev D standard released last year, and now in force, insists on this.  The most recent FDA standards also make this a stipulation.

Yet we often visit companies without any formal method of controlling their CNC programs and who openly admit they have multiple variations of the same program from different operators or programmers.  Some machines are loaded by memory stick, some by RS232, some by memory card and, quite often, there is no recent backup of the machine memory at all.

Where companies do have a formal method, they are only keeping the current, proven, program without any audit history.  This is no longer sufficient and is beginning to affect more and more precision engineering companies.

So let’s be really clear here.  If you use CNC machining methods and you provide a sub-contract service for any of the larger Aerospace, Medical, Military or Motor companies they will insist that you adhere to the same standards.

That’s where Cambridge Numerical come in. We have a solution from Cimco, the world’s Number One DNC software company, and it is called NC-Base.

NC-Base controls program flow to all your CNC machine tools and makes sure that every program change is logged and fully audited.  CNC programs sent back from machines are compared and quarantined automatically for review by a supervisor.  CNC operators can only ever access the current, proven program.  Every single version of a program is kept and can be restored and when the auditors visit they can print a revision history and audit trail for all programs.

A few years ago this was niche software used by a few big companies.  Since 2014 it has become the largest selling product in our portfolio.

For more details on how NC-Base can provide you with the solution you’re looking for, or to discover what else we can do for you and your business call us on 01480 468 639.

 

 

 

Cambridge Regional College (CRC) testimonial

Cambridge Regional College (CRC) is the top Further Education College in the country for 16-18 year-old level 3 student achievement and a leading apprenticeship provider, with 3,000 full-time students and more than 3,800 apprentices currently in training.

They were looking to provide their apprentice engineers with an easy to learn and full featured software package to assist them in teaching the engineers of the future.

CRC decided on Cimco Edit, CNC-Calc and the Fanuc NC-Guide Machine Simulation Software to train their students.

 

Gas Arc Testimonial

Gas Arc are a world leader in the production of gas control systems to the oil and gas industry as well as the medical industry.

Gas Arc used to have systems in place that were manually controlled and retrospective.

A decision was made to look for an automatic solution that would enable them to organise and control their CNC files and give them versioning and traceability control in real time, they also wanted real time machine information, so they could be proactive on decisions regarding their production and machine management.

Gas Arc decided on Cimco Edit, NC-Base, DNC-Max and MDC-Max as a complete solution.

 

Did You Know….?

 

Cambridge Numerical Control was established in 1981 as a supplier of programming stations for CNC machine tools via paper tape.  Our first system was released on a Shelton Signet twin floppy CPM PC with no graphics capability and was called TapeMaster.  We supplied the PC, TapeMaster edit software, a printer, plotter and an M42 punch unit for creating the paper tapes.  The complete package cost over £8,000 (which was a lot of money in 1981) and our first customer was British Rail Engineering.

Scroll forward 37 years and we still supply software for CNC program generation and management – but the price is less in actual money and far less in real terms.

Cimco Edit does everything the TapeMaster software did, has full graphics backplot, verification and simulation and sells for £450.  Truly a testament to how most things are now far cheaper in real terms than they were nearly 40 years ago.

We still supply a complete solution if required and our products range from Cimco Edit, DNC (program transfer to CNC machines), programme revision control (for ISO, FDA and BS approvals) to machine data capture (MDC) for managing your CNC machines and generating OEE statistics.

We also design and develop custom solutions for our customers based upon our standard products and can integrate our solution into your existing ERP systems to capture machine job times, part counts and machine efficiency.

We are continuously investing in new technology and methods and we are a forerunner in Industry 4.0 by connecting older legacy machines to internet and cloud based systems.

We are passionate about up-skilling engineers for the future and have recently released our CNC Training Room – providing state-of-the-art machine simulators for common machines so CNC programmers and operators can learn to use the machine.

To find out how we can help you, call us or email us at sales@cnc.uk.com