POLCA stands for Paired-cell Overlap Loops of Cards with Authorization. POLCA is a production steering and control system for high mix/low volume and custom made products environments aimed at keeping the lead time at the shop floor short.

Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Aided Manufacture (CAM) software has been developed since the late 1950s and is an essential component of modern manufacturing. The term CAD covers a range of applications from 2D drafting packages to full 3D design packages with simulation and analysis tools.

As a machining company, are you considering investing in a new CAM system? Then you'll certainly want to consider the following points of interest!  CAM (computer-aided manufacturing), like CAD (computer-aided design), is done via customised software packages. There are some relevant aspects to consider when buying a new CAM system.

CAM or CAD/CAM

“Simulation is the next best thing to observing a real system in operation since it allows to study the situation even though we are unable to experiment directly with the real system” [1]

You may have heard the terms machine learning and AI being used interchangeably, but what are they exactly? Machine learning is broadly speaking the use of statistics to make predictions, while AI is more concerned with behaviour (e.g. playing games (like AlphaGO), visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines or systems that can learn, at least somewhat a

Digitalisation includes the implementation of new and innovative technologies in a real world application context.

In today's production systems, machine breakdowns are very severe. They not only generate unscheduled downtimes with related expenses and dissatisfied customers, but they also wreak havoc with staff scheduling (additional shifts) and warehousing (additional storage), as well as quality deterioration (scrapped components) and subsequent machine warm-up periods.

Robotic process automation (RPA) constitutes a set of software technologies that facilitates the building and deployment of software robots (bots) that mimic human actions when interacting with graphical user interfaces and other digital systems. Actions, such as opening a file, moving the mouse, filling in form fields, etc.

How to make a difference with production digitalisation?