INTEGRATED NC PLANNING AND PROGRAMMING SUPPORT FOR SMALL MANUFACTURING ENTERPRISES

Within the manufacturing environment today, small manufacturing companies are facing increasing pressure to continually improve their competitiveness through the reduction of costs, shorter lead times, higher quality and a transition from medium batch production to small batch manufacture. These pressures require companies to provide accurate and detailed information on the production of components and their related fixturing and tooling data. This paper presents research carried out to investigate the information modelling issues for the integration of the planning and NC part programming of prismatic components for small manufacturing enterprises. A novel computational facility has been designed and implemented which extends the functionality of the current state of the art in NC part programming software. This facility provides database management and administration not only for NC part programs, but incorporates integrated job planning and process planning with automatic generation of accurate operation data simultaneously with NC code generation.