Word: cammings
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...design" applications, CAD/ CAM equipment enables engineers or draftsmen sitting in front of computer screens to make precise, elaborate and exquisitely detailed drawings of any piece of machinery or industrial part imaginable, without ever using rulers, compasses or any of the other traditional tools of the drafting trade. They can simply "sketch" freehand with an electronic pen right on the screen, and the computer, reaching into its memory, gives the rough shapes the precise tolerances requested, even rendering them in three dimensions, or creating solid forms...
...manufacturing, or "CAM" side of the CAD/CAM loop is only now beginning to take shape, but its potential applications are, if anything, even more mind stretching. Already factories are linking up their design and engineering computers to computer-controlled machine tools and robots on the shop floor, and with a push of the button rendering electronic designs into finished products. The ultimate vision is of a "factory of the future," in which everything from ordering parts to packing and shipping out the finished products runs with the smooth, silent pulse of electronic messages moving through computer circuits...
...both West Germany and Japan, interest in CAD/CAM applications is already at the boiling point. Japan's powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry is funding a $59 million CAM development effort, involving 20 of the nation's leading industrial and high-technology firms, to design, build and operate a totally computer-controlled factory producing, among other things, specialized engines and gear boxes, with few if any human employees. The plant is scheduled to go into operation early...
Astonishing productivity gains are becoming almost routine with CAD/CAM technology. Says Paul Quantz, a CAD/ CAM consultant for Dallas-based Productivity International: "By using CAD/CAM, the normal cycle from conception of a product to shipment to customers tends, within five years, to be cut in half. At the same time, potential plant output itself leaps by about...
...ultimate victim of CAD/ CAM may be that venerated symbol of American industrial efficiency, the assembly line. In reality, the assembly line is often as not a rabbit warren of wasted effort and energy. CAD/CAM experts point out that at General Motors, for example, fully 65% of the company's shop-floor manufacturing effort can wind up going into the production of automobile spare parts and assemblies in batches of no more than 50 to 100 items at a time. With each such run, large sections of the production line of a plant often have to be shut down...