DP Technology Eliminates the Need to Edit NC Code

Don Davies, vice president of North American Sales and Application Engineering at DP Technology Corp., spoke with AECCafe Voice about DP Technology and their CAM/CAD system, which has been around for 36 years. AECCafe CEO Sanjay Gangal conducted a video interview at SolidWorks World with DP Technology’s Vytas Cijunelis, Midwest Operations Manager that is available below.

DP Technology put “CAM” first in their description because people buy software from them to create instructions for numerically controlled machine tools, according to Davies.

DP Technology have been a SolidWorks partner for about 20 years. They can bring in native SolidWorks files, product manufacturing information (PMI) files brought directly from the SolidWorks file that can be used to automate some of their manufacturing processes in their product, Esprit.  The ability to bring in a SolidWorks file is a default. For approximately 50 percent of their users, SolidWorks is the dominant CAD program, but many also use Inventor, PTC, SolidEdge, and CATIA.

“We’ve built strong reputation in complex machine tools, and integration between both milling and turning which are difficult machines to create instructions for,” notes Davies. “A big part of that is, can you program and machine inside the computer and can you simulate it? Can you choreograph how that machine will run, and do you have a post-processor which is a translator of simulation of pretty pictures into the NC code that will drive the machine tool?”

In development, DP’s post processors are created so people don’t have to edit NC code, a capability many competitors don’t have. DP builds them, working with major manufacturers of machine tools around the world.

“Sometimes we  live in their facilities to develop their product line,” says Davies. “That’s pretty unique.” Swiss machining and mill turning are two of the processes they do. Swiss machines are smaller machines that do complex parts, turning and milling up to 5 axes simultaneously.

“If you can do that you can do everything above and below it, from simple to complex. Why we’re different, especially in the U.S., is we make software that we sell direct to the customer base, and support it. Most of our competitors are indirect. They’re resellers of a product, and support a geographic region and the next geographic region is supported by another reseller.

Our customer is anyone with a machine tool, and we have customers who are small shops as well as Fortune 500 customers.”

Knowledge based manufacturing allows the end user to create a database of knowledge that is applicable to different kinds of manufacturing processes. The end user can determine the intelligence of how that is going to be applied, whether it’s automated or they need to be more productive in how they do it.

“They can take advantage of our engine, tailor it to their needs, expand upon it, they can make it as smart or intelligent as they’d like to, they can share it with other people in their group,” says Davies. “I have customers in a single company who have built these and shared them to a hundred different sites around the world. The artificial intelligence (AI) is about knowledge based manufacturing, and that’s where the intelligence comes in.”

Davies cites some good customer examples. One unnamed customer recently implemented the DP product Esprit as a replacement for their existing CAM product. During the first six months they saved a total of $1.5 million. “We were able to change how they were able to run their machines,” says Davies. “We made them much more efficient. They don’t have to do any special editing of NC code. They can go from the computer to the machine tool. We could choreograph and run the machine in an optimal way that shaved off huge amounts of time.”

Using an example with real figures, Davies said the company may spend 22 minutes making a part the old way, and after working with the DP software, they could make the same part in six minutes. He said the user whose idea it was to go with DP Technology’s Esprit got a bonus, raise and new position.

Because people do resist change, it’s not always easy to get people to buy in to the possibility of increased productivity.

Another very large customer spent two years trying to get a complex machine to work, with zero success with a competitor’s products. “Within a week using our software they had a $1/2 million machine up and running and making parts,” says Davies.

Capturing the process of how someone is going to make a part, saving it and using it again is knowledge based computing. The simulation shows what the machine is going to do and show it in a digital world.

“If you can see it in the computer, the exact machine, how the cuts are being made to create those parts before you go over to the machine tool, two things are happening: you are defining a manufacturing process that you have confidence in and you are optimizing it. Second, if you see it correctly on the computer, once you go to the machine tool you know it is going to work the exact same way. A drastic problem may be if a machine tool crashes into something else when it’s not supposed to. That’s very expensive in the machine tool industry. You see it on the computer. We spend huge amounts of time making sure we have a handshake between what we see on the screen with the software and what happens at the machine tool.”

DP owns a simulation engine and an entire company that creates their simulation engine that they purchased in 2008.

DP’s Esprit World Conference will be held this year in June in Jacksonville, Florida, a week-long conference for end users, featuring technical training.  lasts one week for end users, week of technical training. Our sponsors include Ocuma, Space Claim, and Ansys. Professionals come to focus on the Esprit product and to learn what they need to know to move to next level of accomplishment with the product.

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