Safe in the JetCam nest

By JetCAM International SARL

ASCO Power Technologies, which is headquartered in Florham Park, New Jersey, and has a facility in Lexington, North Carolina, manufactures automatic transfer switches, switchgear and other power management products. The company has used JetCAM Expert nesting software since receiving it with a Finn-Power 880 CNC punch press in 1997. Its performance provided a stark contrast to the different nesting software systems driving other machines at the facility at that time.

“We used a range of nesting software systems supplied alongside machines at the time, with varying issues,” said Fabrication Specialist James Hunley. “One was slow and not user-friendly — more of a CAD system than software designed for punching. Functions, such as batch nesting, were very cumbersome. We moved to another system, which resolved some of the issues of its predecessor but brought its own problems. Making changes often required you to start over — not convenient when you’d just spent 20 minutes tooling a part.”

Having multiple nesting systems, each driving specific machines, caused its own issues as employees were less knowledgeable on some systems than others. This also resulted in problems during holidays or sick leaves. Retooling jobs for other machines often required going back to DXF files and starting again.

“One system was unreliable at applying tooling if the part was not created perfectly in CAD,” Hunley said. “This meant that we’d have to go back to the engineering department to get changes made to the CAD file before trying again.”

After using JetCAM Expert alongside other systems, he realized that it was outperforming them.

“We started to wonder what else it could drive,” Hunley said. “It was the most user-friendly, and financially it was cheaper than other systems. Why, when we can do things faster in JetCAM, would we not use it for everything?”

ASCO Power Technologies manufactures automatic transfer switches, switchgear and other power management products. Image courtesy of JetCAM International

The decision was made around 2005 to standardize on JetCAM Expert for all new machines.

“We’ve run a number of benchmark comparisons over the years, and each time JetCAM outperformed other systems both in terms of overall speed of programming and nesting efficiency,” Hunley said. “Programming was up to 75% quicker, and nesting efficiency could be as much as 14% better. The machine path optimization allowed jobs to run faster with code generated by JetCAM.”

In addition to new machines running JetCAM Expert, he set about replacing the remaining nesting systems and talked about post-processors with Duluth, Georgia-based NestOne Solutions LLC, a distributor for JetCAM International.

“We needed a stable and consistent solution for all of our machines,” Hunley said. “After we initially got JetCAM, we quickly identified that we were seeing bottlenecks on other machines. When we purchased posts for other machines, such as our Wiedemann, we were able to move work over to it in a matter of hours, whereas previously it would take three days.”

Technology-specific functionality also has saved time for ASCO Power Technologies. Tool Teach has been particularly instrumental in streamlining the process of applying punch tool hits to complex components.