GibbsCAM | CAM Software Features

CAM Software Speeds Manufacturing Productivity

SOFTWARE

Bill Gibbs is president and CEO of Gibbs and Associates (Moorpark, CA), developer ofGibbsCAM software.

Manufacturing Engineering: How can CAM developers help manufacturing customers boost their overall productivity?

Bill Gibbs: In so many ways. Productivity is ultimately about making parts with less labor, making parts with less machining time, making more parts. GibbsCAM's strategic focus is production machining. This is our number one priority, focusing on the needs of people who are involved in production manufacturing. We define production manufacturing as involving people who are concerned about the cost of a part, the run time, the machining time, the quality. There are areas of our industry that are not production machining, prototype shops and mold-and-die shops, and we like these people as customers, too, but that doesn't stop us from focusing on the needs of the production machinist as our first priority.

So how do we improve their productivity? Literally everything our product does is trying to answer that question and solve that problem. We start by having a product that we think takes less training to learn; a product that programs their parts in less time; one that produces programs that run without error, without flaws, because crashing the machine is certainly nonproductive; and we try to produce programs that have faster run-times. Because machine time has to be the single biggest cost, we want to be able to set up the part faster, because setup time is a key cost component. We want to be able to automatically produce setup and run-time documentation, so that our customers don't again waste hours and hours putting paper together for the machinist and the setup. All of these things become factors in how a machine shop is more productive with our software than without our software.

ME: How difficult is it to program CAM software?

Gibbs: At the high-end of production machining, we now have these multitasking [MTM] machines that are hot. Mazak picked GibbsCAM as the programming software to recommend for its Integrex machines, and we are a strategic partner of Mazak to supply their customers with high-end productivity software. Just recently, Mori Seiki approved us as a software supplier for their high-end machines. We had to jump through hoops to demonstrate to Mori Seiki that we had a quality product that supported their machines, and that their customers would be more productive programming their machines with our software. So, it's not any one feature of CAM software that's important-it's having the complete suite of capabilities in the product, as well as service, support, and training.

ME: What are some of the most important trends, such as high-speed machining, MTM, automatic feature recognition, and solids machining, in today's CAM software?

Gibbs: They're all important, and I don't think any one of them is necessarily more important than the others. In the CAM world, getting excited about any CAM system because it has one feature you like is about as myopic as you can get. A CAM system is not characterized by a single feature-it's not even well-characterized by a list of features. With a CAM system, again it comes back to how does it work with your people on your parts to run your machine? And the suite of capabilities required to be the best product for your people, your parts, and your machines, is going to cover all these bases. If you're doing high-speed machining, then you're going to be concerned about the highspeed machining capabilities. If you're doing three-axis surfacing, or five-axis rotary milling, you certainly need to be more concerned about those kinds of machining capabilities, but that doesn't mean you get to stop being concerned about all the other aspects of this rather complex decision.

ME: How are software developers making their CAM software easier to use?

Gibbs: I don't think most of them are. All of us have the same problem. What are we going to invest our $1 million or $2 million of development in next year? What are our computer programmers going to work on? And your sales department comes in and they give you the list of all the reasons their resellers say they lost sales. This is a vicious cycle. They go through this whole list of reasons that they felt they lost orders. 'If only we had these features, we would have gotten all those orders,' which isn't exactly true, but it's easy to get swept along by this feature madness. So with all this pressure to add new features, we strive to invest time in maintaining and improving the things that we feel make our software easy to use and high quality, even though they don't create new features.

ME: What are some of the key manufacturing markets, such as aerospace, automotive, medical, heavy equipment, that CAM serves, and how are those customers aided by CAM tools?

Gibbs: It's a difficult question to answer because we don't focus on manufacturing markets; I personally think that there isn't a whole lot of difference between medical parts and aerospace parts. There are more similarities than there are differences. Medical parts don't tend to be 60' long, and airplane parts don't tend to be made out of the same materials all the time. What CAM software cares about is what are we starting with? In both industries, what materials we're going to be cutting makes a little bit of difference. What tool strategies do we want to apply? What kind of machines are they going to be using? There's tremendous overlap. So it really doesn't matter a tremendous amount the difference between industries, if they're mainstream production machining industries. We work with the power industry, the oil industry in Texas, and we like medical. We have customers doing bone spurs and hip joints. What's really neat about medical is that a lot of medical stuff is custom-tailored to a customer and low volume-and that means more programming. If a guy's going to run off three million bone screws, he's got a 15-minute program that he's going to run for a year and a half. If a guy's doing hip ball joints, then he's going to potentially make a different ball joint, or at least a range of sizes, for all the different customers. So again, there's more programming involved. It's fun working with the medical industry because a lot of times doctors are involved, and doctors are highly educated, technical people who are looking for technical solutions. These are interesting people to work with.

ME: Consolidation seems to be underway in the CAM market. What does this trend mean for the CAM market?

Gibbs: For the market as whole, we're following the paths of the business models of a mature market, meaning there are as many or more products on the market than there's market demand for. It means that most products have covered the basic capabilities to be good enough. It also means that we're all struggling to identify what makes us different. We're becoming a commodity. While I can point out all the differences that make us better, people who buy my competitors' products are not going to fail. They're not going to crash and burn. We have some reputable competition in this industry. What's going to happen is those of us who have achieved adequate success over the last 20 years, who have a large enough installed base over the last 20 years, who are still successful, profitable, can continue to grow our products, can continue to grow our business, we can still look forward to growing. Companies that are small and marginal cannot. They're going to get squeezed out, and this is what makes them attractive purchases to people who want to acquire them. We have looked at acquiring some of our competition over the past several years. It's a difficult business decision.

ME: Do you expect that consolidation in CAM will continue in a big way?

Gibbs: Sure, as the small companies struggle, they're going to be cheaper and cheaper to buy, and companies will be bought just for their installed base. At some price, it makes sense for me to buy a small company just to have access to their customers.

ME: How do you see the current-business outlook for CAM software, and for users of CAM software?

Gibbs: I think it looks strong, 2005 was a record year for Gibbs. We had very good sales, very good growth, and very good profitability. I would say that it was primarily economic conditions, and a good product. We've had some good partner-. ships established, including Methods Machine Tools picking us for Nakamura-Tome support, Mazak selecting us for Integrex support, and our collaboration with Mori Seiki, which is huge. It's a breakthrough for Mori to add other people to their approved list. To do this, we had to develop postprocessors for all their new NT Series machines, and Mori Seiki engineers had to approve all our postprocessors. Mazak had to approve our postprocessors for Mazak, and Methods had to approve our postprocessors for Nakamura-Tome. For all these high-end machines, we're offering factory-approved postprocessors that the customer can use. We have to match the parameters of the control, but other than that they're perfect.

ME: How key is it for CAM suppliers to guarantee that postprocessors will work 100% of the time?

Gibbs: We do strive to build perfect posts, and the majority of the postprocessors are factory-built by Gibbs. It's not a strange option we offer at incredible expense, it's the way we prefer to deliver postprocessors. We have about 10 people whose full-time job is postprocessors. They're experts at it. We check them against what the end user actually has, because as we say, every CNC machine is a snowflake-there are hundreds of parameters that could have been changed, there are dozens of options that might or might not be in the machine. Even though it's a machine that we have factory-approved, we don't know that the customer's machine is identical. We've done dozens and dozens of machines-all the same exact model number-that are all a little different in the way they program. They are snowflakes. They're all a little different, just a little, but if one thing is different and you don't get it, it crashes the machine. So a post has to be 100% perfect, it has to pick up every detail, it has to match the snowflake. And if you get all that, then it's not the customer's problem. What we don't want is the customer to be saying 'geez, I've got to come in this weekend and work on fixing my post.' We want the customer to say 'we're cutting chips this weekend, untended, lights-out, 24/7, we got GibbsCAM.' That's what Haas does with us.

Copyright Society of Manufacturing Engineers May 2006
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