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Success Story

Graitec and Autodesk Combine to Help Penta Rise to the CAM Machining Challenge

Graitec and Autodesk Combine to Help Penta Rise to the CAM Machining Challenge

Customer challenge

Penta Precision Engineering is a specialist engineering company focused on providing a high-quality precision machining service to customers to an ISO 9001 quality accredited standard. The company works for customers across a wide range of industry sectors from aerospace to marine equipment, from medical devices to military cameras and manages machining requirements for these businesses, using modern computer numerical control (CNC) machines, quick set tooling and fixtures and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) techniques to ensure designs meet exacting client requirements and deliver quality parts, including jigs and fixtures. The company needed to continuously evolve its tooling design to keep up with industry demands and the requirements of its mainly project-based customers.

Project goals

As the company grew, it became increasingly urgent to find a more seamless, efficient, and cost-effective approach to CAM, which would allow it to unify its design, engineering, and manufacturing process onto a single software platform, and deliver the highest possible quality services to its customers. To do this, Penta turned to leading Autodesk Solution Provider, Graitec and Autodesk Fusion 360, a cloud-based 3D modelling, CAD, CAM, CAE and PCB software platform for product design and manufacturing. The software's rich functionality attracted Penta; its cost-effectiveness and its ability to coordinate design, engineering and manufacturing tasks all in one platform. Penta can bring parts into Fusion, design and develop jigs and fixtures; create a CNC code; download it to the machines and machine the part up. It is a one-stop tool. It now has a total of ten licences of the software.

Solution

Andy Vick, Manufacturing Quality Manager, Penta Precision Engineering, said: "What's also beneficial about this software is its flexibility. Bringing models in from it does not cause us any problems, and we can use it to create 2D engineering or process drawings if we need to. That fits well with how we work because we need to be agile and fast-moving to keep up with demand." "The software is widely used in the business," Vick confirms. "About 15 people now have access to it. Eight or nine of those are daily users on the CAM side, and the others are occasional users, who need it to view models or take pieces of information from it." Penta is currently converting programs still stored on a legacy CAM platform over to Fusion 360, and it also has a third 2D CAM software solution, which it will keep for the time being. However, over time, it plans to convert some of its more technical 2D parts into models through this process of evolution.

Business outcome

Graitec has delivered training to Penta on an ongoing basis and also provides ongoing support and quickly reacts to Penta's issues. Adding to the flexibility of the Autodesk software, it is delivered to Penta on a user-based licence. That means any authorised user can log in on a laptop or PC, no matter where they are located and access the data. As Vick explains: "That makes it really flexible. You can do modelling work when and where it suits you. You can work offline a lot easier than with server-based systems, and you can carry on working even if the server is down." "The software is also very user-friendly," he continues. "CAD/CAM systems can be really challenging. They are very powerful pieces of software with lots of functions, but you can pick up Fusion 360 relatively easily and start running with it. Manipulating models, creating fixtures, and extrapolating relevant information are all intuitive, and it is quick to alert you if your CAD and CAM models don't align."

Conclusion

Penta also appreciates that Autodesk Fusion 360 is continuously evolving and is being heavily invested in. Ultimately though, the main benefit is that they are working in a single environment, which drives efficiencies. There is still some work to implement it throughout the business in the future. As Vick himself acknowledges. "When we get model or drawing queries, we would like to start to use some of the features that are in Fusion already, so the customer can then share and animate a problem without needing themselves to have the software installed." "In addition, we want to utilise it more intelligently to standardise some of our formatting and build up a database of tooling within Fusion to ensure everyone is working from the same data. There is more planning work to do, but thanks to Graitec's support and the flexibility of the Autodesk software, I'm confident we have a solution to address our evolving machining and tooling challenges."

Project summary

    Duration & delivery

  • 5
  • 2022-01-04

    Autodesk solutions

  • Fusion 360
  • Fusion 360 - Machining Extension
  • FeatureCAM

    Services provided

  • System Implementation
  • Configuration & Deployment
  • Technical Support
  • Product Training

    Customer industry

  • Additive Manufacturing
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