CAD/CAM System Dramatically Increases Shop's Productivity

摘要

Rapid growth in a machine shop often brings with it considerable turmoil and inefficiency. At Fremont, California's C & H Enterprises, Inc., however, both conditions were avoided through the design and installation of a new internal work flow and control system. "I was twenty-one years old in 1994 when I arrived at C & H Enterprises as a set-up man/machinist," recalls Steve Heredia, company CNC programmer/production manager. "At that time we were in a much smaller facility. We were running three older pieces of machining equipment and there was no internal control system capable of handling rapid growth. We were using a primitive CAD/CAM system and we had no formal set up sheets," recalls Heredia. "And, to show you how loose things really were, no one ever bothered to save a program once it was written. If we did the part again, we had to reprogram it from scratch. I guess that kind of system was okay when we were small and there weren't too many jobs in the house, but just about then we really started growing and something had to be done to increase efficiency."