Integrated Manufacturing System for Precision Press Tooling

The press tooling industry, characterised by many small-scale job-shops, is facing an increasingly competitive global market. This comes at a time when there is a shortage of experienced process planners and unavailability of affordable CAD/CAM systems that could provide an integrated solution for manufacturing sheet metal tooling. Many commercially available CAD/CAM systems are either too expensive or too narrow in scope, in the sense that they provide only point solutions. The design of press tools and its manufacturing functions are highly specialised and knowledge-intensive in nature. This paper presents a framework and the implementation details of an integrated system that has been developed for a local sheet metal tooling company specialising in precision punches and dies. A PC-based system has been implemented on an AutoCAD platform using the Autolisp programming language.