Manufacturing costs are escalating partly due to material prices, supply chain breakdowns, along with labor cost increases and shortages.
When adding shop personnel, we’re often faced with the challenge of trying to outbid the company down the street for the next seasoned machinist or building up a candidate with less experience. Unfortunately, for many shops, by the time these workers are fully trained, they move on to the next higher offer, taking their expertise with them and leaving us to begin the search for top talent again.
With all these challenges, it’s more critical than ever to leverage advanced software tools that can accelerate your shop’s throughput with greater efficiency.
Running natively inside the SOLIDWORKS CAD user interface, SOLIDWORKS CAM and CAMWorks have built-in advantages for manufacturers to do just that — much more.
1. Explore On-Demand Manufacturing Services
When you’re faced with increasing material prices, one solution is on-demand manufacturing services.
Many manufacturing-as-a-service (MaaS) providers can get the job done based on your unique needs. For example, if you don’t have a lot of quantity to manufacture, no problem, you can order the amount you need when you need it. Or if you want to explore how additive manufacturing can enhance your business, MaaS can give you that opportunity.
So, when uncertainty strikes your supply chain, your budget is tight, and your overseas production team is delayed or blocked, a MaaS company specializing in CNC can be your back-pocket manufacturing team while you gain your footing.
2. Increase Your Machine Shop Efficiency
Another way to fight rising costs is to optimize your shop’s production. There are many advanced SOLIDWORKS CAM and CAMWorks capabilities that you can integrate to automate processes and make your shop run smoother.
Here are the top four integrated CAM capabilities you can start checking out:
- Automatic Feature Recognition (AFR): automatically analyzes any 3D solid model and returns machinable features
- Associativity: create toolpaths that adapt to changes in the CAD model, including Engineering Change Orders (ECOs)
- Model Based Definition (MBD) & Tolerance Based Machining (TBM): tolerances will influence machining and live on within the model, not in some dirty drawing on the shop floor
- Ultra-high efficiency toolpaths: deliver optimum material removal in both milling and turning
3. Pass On Your CNC Machining Best Practices
Adding integrated machining software like CAMWorks or SOLIDWORKS CAM can help you bridge the skills gap in your workforce. These tools allow seasoned professionals to easily share your company’s machining best practices with entry-level CNC programmers.
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And here’s how to create standards in both CAM software in three steps:
- Determine your best practices and important information you want to store.
- Open the Technology Database (or TechDB for short). The TechDB lets us store valuable information for tools, tool cribs, strategies, and more. It’s designed to automate programming and reduce errors.
- Add or modify the tool libraries to your company’s needs.
Now, when someone moves into a new role, you’ll have captured those best practices in the TechDB, making that information easily sharable with your next CNC programmer or even your apprentices.
The Final Note
What’s great about all these integrated CAM capabilities is they reside inside SOLIDWORKS, the most popular solid modeling CAD package in history. It makes it easy to plug and play.
Yet, we’ve only scratched the surface of this topic.
If you’d like to learn more, watch our webinar, “5 Ways CAMWorks & SOLIDWORKS CAM Accelerate CNC Programming.”
You can also contact us at Hawk Ridge Systems and speak to our experienced CAM team about how CAMWorks and SOLIDWORKS CAM can impact your company’s machining trajectory.
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