Strategic Parts Management PARTsolutions by CADENAS

PLÜMAT will be introducing the Strategic Parts Management PARTsolutions by CADENAS to its business units of engineering, development and work preparation in the course of 2018. The Geometric Similarity Search GEOsearch of PARTsolutions will increase the reuse of components in the company.

"We will especially benefit from PARTsolutions and GEOsearch in the area of work preparation. Here we expect savings in the work to be expended as well as the costs in CAM programming," says Detlef Fangmann, administration director of PLÜMAT.

Work preparation plays a special role in the producing industry, as this is where the decision is made on how a new product is to be produced. The employees involved in work preparation thus determine exactly which CNC machine is to be used and which CNC program will carry out the production. Manual work preparation and production planning, where all details must once again be defined and programmed, is therefore very time-consuming. It is easier if work preparation can access information from products already produced in the company which are geometrically very similar to the new product. CADENAS will be supporting PLÜMAT at this point with the Geometric Similarity Search GEOsearch.

In future, engineers will easily be able to search for geometrically similar components already produced in the PLÜMAT company, with the help of GEOsearch by CADENAS. With a similar component, information about the production machine and the CNC program used can be viewed and, if needed, can be taken over for the new component. This way, the new product can be produced with the same production process as the previous product. Complex, manual CNC programming is thus omitted.

"Since we at PLÜMAT count on the PLM system keytech PLM, our choice was clearly for the fully-integrated Geometric Similarity Search GEOsearch by CADENAS. Both keytech and CADENAS have proven to be very flexible and convinced us in a mutual pilot project of the potential savings in design and work preparation," Fangmann says.

"Originally, we developed the Geometric Similarity Search to solve the problem of different parts designations. All that's needed for the GEOsearch is the selection of a 3D reference component to find repeat parts for design needs and, in many cases, to use already existing parts instead of increasing the diversity of parts and thereby the costs. The fact that the technology is also being used outside design departments and now supports the work planner when choosing the suitable tools or CNC programs, or helps the purchaser with his make or buy decision, just goes to show the potential of the technology," says Markus Poppinghuys, CADENAS branch manager, Essen, Germany.