Product Intro: DNC Connect for NX CAM
What’s the Problem?
Manufacturing data management is a vital, yet too often overlooked, player in determining how productive and efficient a production floor really is.
Users and managers on every shop floor need to ask themselves these questions:
- Where and how is our data managed?
- Is our data transparent for everyone?
- What data has been released?
- What happens to changes from production?
- How can we ensure secure access?
- Can we connect a Direct Numerical Control (DNC) system?
The problem is that many manufacturing companies have very poorly managed data. For example, imagine that every output file is titled by a different user and put into a shared network drive. With that kind of naming process, managing what information is the most recent or identifying duplicates becomes a task in itself. This leads to wasted time, production errors and rework, and unnecessary costs as a result. Proper manufacturing data management helps to eliminate the delays and costs that come with bad data.
What’s the Solution?
Especially for users of 3D CAM systems, there is a further degree of complexity relating to the amount of data to be created. CAM can easily turn one part data set from construction into more than 1,000. This amount of data must be kept under control. To deal with this, Siemens PLM Software has created a technology path with various solutions with which the client can grow from a native to a fully-managed environment. One solution for this is DNC Connect for NX CAM.
DNC Connect for NX CAM allows the native NX CAM user to easily and directly manage created production data such as NC programs, tool lists, tooling sheets and clamping plans. By connecting Shop Floor Connect for Teamcenter, this data can also be made available to production. The benefits to the native NX CAM user are the integrated management and user interface, rapid searching via a browser interface and the secure management of data in unified environment. In addition to managing them, DNC Connect also allows NX CAM users to add, search for, revise, release and block production data. The user can do all of this directly from the usual NX CAM interface without ever having to leave it.
DNC Connect for NX CAM
DNC Connect for NX CAM is a software tool designed for smaller and medium-sized manufacturers that addresses all these challenges. It provides a way for companies to manage their engineering and production data and make it available to the shop floor, even if they do not have or are not ready to take on an enterprise Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system like Siemens Teamcenter for Manufacturing. It is user-friendly, as it is built-in within the NX client as a plugin. So rather than having to open another program and learning how to do another application, the user will just click on DNC Connect for NX CAM and identify what the output data will be named and to what machine on the shop floor they wish to send the post-processing.
Main Features:
- Data management for native NX CAM users
- Easy to use from NX CAM
- No need for Teamcenter client
- Data Management in Teamcenter Database
- Work Package hands off to Shop Floor Connect machine tool clients for DNC
- Auto assign program number with number generator
- Revisioning
- Managed CAM data output such as NC program, tool list, shop docs
- Set status function (approved, check, locked)
- Assign work station/work place to output
- Search and visualize managed data
- Managed hand-off to Shop Floor Connect
