High productivity and operational excellence are two of the ultimate goals for any machine shop, whether the factory might have a plant list of 50 machine tools or just a handful – and embracing new technology advancements has the power to achieve that desired step up in both machining and shop-floor performance.
Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division launched its innovative new software suite at EMO 2023, HxGN Production Machining, which the company says will revolutionise shop-floor operations across a vast range of industries, including aerospace, automotive and medical devices.
Speaking to Machinery at EMO, Alexander Freund, director of product management at Hexagon, says that the launch of the production machining suite is part of the company’s new strategy.
He explains: “What is important for us is that for a production machining customer that we are serving the customer across the whole workflow. In the new suite, we are covering the workflow from delivery to design for manufacturing, machine programming, job certification, documentation, quality inspection, as well as the production analytics.
"We have all the connected products that are available for them to do their jobs.”
Freund says that the new HxGN Production Machining suite also has innovations that help to tackle the ever-growing skills gap and labour shortage that both continue to impact production engineering.
He explains that new machinists and CAM programmers can easily be trained, without the risk of them braking anything on a machine tool which can prove costly to companies.
SUITE CAPABILITIES
The new suite has stand-out features which the global technology company believes will have major implications for machine shops that will “ensure increased productivity and operational excellence”, through the use of model-based manufacturing and the automation benefits of artificial intelligence (AI).
