CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
15 March 2005
Product News
Pathtrace Marks Productive Autodesk Partnership With New Software Capabilities
Marking its nine-year alliance with Autodesk, Inc., Pathtrace announced that EdgeCAM Version 9.5 fully supports Autodesk Inventor® 10 mechanical design software and provides true data integrity and model-to-toolpath associativity. The newest version of EdgeCAM from Pathtrace, Autodesk's Global Preferred CAM Partner, introduces new functionality and ease-of-use, including loading native Autodesk Inventor assemblies (*.iam) directly into EdgeCAM.
As an Autodesk Global Preferred CAM Partner, Pathtrace and Autodesk development teams work closely to ensure the highest level of interoperability between EdgeCAM and Autodesk Inventor software. EdgeCAM Solid Machinist respects project paths and sub-assemblies and complies with Autodesk data management rules. The partnership between Autodesk and Pathtrace provides joint customers with a complete design, data management and CAM solution to reduce manufacturing time, cut costs while reducing scrap, and increase profitable machine time.
Steve Sivitter, CEO for Pathtrace, said, "By integrating our software with the latest release of Autodesk Inventor, we are offering customers a fully associative CAM solution that addresses the major manufacturing disciplines, and enables them to bring their products to market faster."
The CAM standard in intelligent solids-based manufacturing, EdgeCAM offers superior integration, associativity and machining functionality to any other system currently available.
"Autodesk's partnership with Pathtrace is important to our commitment to help customers create, manage and share design and product data to realize ideas and get the right designs done more quickly," said Robert Kross, vice president of Autodesk's Manufacturing Solutions Division. "Our applications' interoperability further enhances Autodesk Inventor functional design capabilities that allow engineers to focus on how end products work instead of how to use software to design them."
Joint customers such as Tonnard Manufacturing in Corry, Pennsylvania, benefit from the long-standing partnership. Short production runs, frequently for prototypes, predominate Tonnard's workload, and short-run form tooling has been a Tonnard specialty for decades.
Most form tools at Tonnard-and every tool machined on the company's Haas machines-are designed in Autodesk Inventor. "Every short-run job seems to come down to the cost of tooling that will be used to make just a few hundred or a few thousand parts. EdgeCAM's interoperability with Autodesk Inventor lets us set up machining quickly, and was a leading reason for our software choice," said Aaron Harwood, programming manager for Tonnard.
Tonnard finds the combination of Haas machines, EdgeCAM and Autodesk Inventor contribute to its competitive advantage, and help keep manufacturing in the United States.
"Using EdgeCAM, Autodesk Inventor, and the Haas machines allows us to take on tougher jobs," said Horwood. "Customers prefer to deal with us for their smaller production runs and they want us to take on some pretty difficult jobs. So the more complex tool that we can make, the more complex part we can make, and the more we can do to serve our customers."
Horwood said, "Having accounts with large customers is great, but you better have a strong list of small customers too. EdgeCAM, Autodesk Inventor, and Haas help us get them, and keep them."
Pathtrace Engineering Systems is the developer of EdgeCAM, an easy-to-use software solution devoted to automating the process of NC programming for metal cutting machine tools. Offices are established in the UK, USA, China and Japan, complementing a worldwide network of resellers. For information about Pathtrace and EdgeCAM, please visit http://www.edgecam.com . EdgeCAM is Windows 2000 and XP compliant and has over 32,000 users worldwide.
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