We received an order from an Italian customer delivering for a car park in London the roof and bodyshell. 150.000 parts have to be adopted from a 3D CAD.

After intensive consultation we came over with the production managers and IT specialists from Think-Design that an adoption of 3D models as .SAT or .STEP takes too much time. Even with 3minutes for a file opening and closing it would take 7.500 hours working time. This corresponds, compared with a 3-shift-operation of the programmers, to more than one year programming time!

Our solution:

The parts will be assembled to 150 part families. We get for each part family a model part as 3D model and a feature table for the machinings. In PUMA-System we assign the referencres and relations to the machinings, so that the dependencies of machinings get known from part measurements and saw cuts. The PUMA-System generates afterwards an output in NCW format for the conversion with the NC-X (see www.nc-x.com).

This NCW file is provided with parameters and formulas, so that the relations and references of machining features are displayed. Now we send the feature tables to the NCW template and generate in a second-time-cycle the 1.000 NC programs for the corresponding part family.

The customer uses multiple profile machining centers from different manufacturers.