Q&A with Mike Coleman

By Ann Mazakas

This is the ninth in a series of interviews with leaders in the CAM industry.—DE

Mike Coleman is the CEO of TekSoft Inc., a developer of Windows-based CAD/CAM software products for use in the metalworking industries. TekSoft develops and markets CAMWorks, a state-of-the-art solids CAM product that runs inside SolidWorks.

Coleman was a partner at TekSoft CAD/CAM from 1991 until 1998 when it was a division of OnCourse Technologies. He then led an investment team made up of TekSoft management and Geometric Software Solutions Limited—a leading PLM services provider with more than 20 years of experience in CAD/CAM/ CAE, PDM and MPM—in the buyout of the TekSoft and Cimtronics divisions from OnCourse Technologies on January 1, 2005.

Coleman has a total of 25 years’  experience in the design and manufacture of components and equipment for a wide cross-section of market sectors including automotive, aerospace,  medical device, semiconductor, appliance, food, and consumer products. He has held various positions in design and manufacturing, engineering management, operations, and sales and marketing at design and build firms. Prior to working at TekSoft, he was vice president at Unaxis, a Swiss semiconductor equipment company.

What current trends do you see in manufacturing?

Coleman: When you look at manufacturing from a worldwide perspective, the current trend that we see is an aging manufacturing workforce in Western Europe and the United States and a rapidly expanding manufacturing environment in Asia. There is a serious shortage of knowledgeable, experienced manufacturing engineers who can actually generate the code for the CNC machines in the most optimized manner for the maximum profitability. In Asia, the manufacturing market is expanding so rapidly that it doesn’t have a lot of experienced people. In Europe and the U.S., our experienced workers are heading toward retirement. All of this leads to CAM being a limiting factor in growth and profitability. We are seeing a lot of interest in knowledge-based manufacturing because it allows a company to capture the knowledge of their longtime manufacturing engineers and leverage that into the future. In Asia it allows manufacturers to take inexperienced manufacturing engineers and give them a good starting point. There is also a trend toward native Windows-based applications that adhere to Microsoft Foundation Classes, a Microsoft library that provides an overall framework for developing software applications. These types of applications are well recognized and globally utilized so that newcomers can feel instantly familiar with the CAM environment.

How is the lack of an experienced workforce affecting your customers?

Coleman: Owners and managers of manufacturing companies know that they cannot pin the entire success of their business on one long-term, experienced manufacturing engineer. They have to have a backup plan. Because there is a short supply of experienced manufacturing engineers, companies are looking to encapsulate what these guys know and automate it. The managers and owners are very aware of the weakness they have in this area. If we can capture this knowledge in our software and make the interface recognizable to newcomers, it will help reduce the gating factor of current CAM systems.

Does CAMWorks support knowledge-based manufacturing?

Coleman: CAMWorks is very knowledge based and very automatic.  As a matter of fact, Geometric Software Solutions Limited (GSSL) bought TekSoft as of January 1, 2005, specifically because CAMWorks is a new generation CAM software program that has automatic feature recognition, automatic operations planning, and a technology database. If you put in the standard feeds, speeds, cut depths, and tools that you use, CAMWorks will automatically go to the technology database and use the prescribed processes that you’ve set up to match the standard operating procedures for your company. Instead of having two or three people individually deciding how to make a hole and what tools to use, you can actually dictate how a hole is machined at your company. Users can set up the technology database to represent their typical processes for their typically recognizable machinable features. CAMWorks will then recognize these machinable features and automatically generate an operation plan.

Has your relationship with GSSL benefited your company?

Coleman: Geometric Software Solutions Limited is a publicly owned company in India that has been a development partner of TekSoft for a long time. We have our own CAMWorks development team here in the U.S. and we leverage the offshore programming divisions of GSSL as our extended R&D team. GSSL made this acquisition because they saw that CAMWorks is at the beginning of its lifecycle rather than a 25-year-old legacy product. Because CAMWorks is a new-generation product that has a native Windows interface built on the Microsoft Foundation Class Library, it is easy to contract out our software development to programmers in other countries. Rather than develop everything ourselves, our strategy is to first look to license technology from best-of-class technology in the form of a license agreement from third-party suppliers.

Why did you adopt this type of development strategy?

Coleman: It’s almost impossible for any of us to believe that we can actually develop and enhance 2- through 5-axis milling, 2-  through 5-axis lathe, multi-axis live-C lathe, mill/turn, EDM, punch,  plasma, laser, nesting, and a solid modeler with verification at an acceptable rate. Based on a set of criteria, we seek out the best-of-class solutions, we negotiate and we license. I added up our total associated R&D force and it came out to around 300 people. To do a good job on all those things, I expect you’d need 300 people.

With our licensing strategy we can actually pound out really big enhancements in very short amounts of time. Our strategy is to have two major releases per year that are very feature rich for each application. Instead of spending years developing new technology, I will buy that technology as soon as it’s clear that a broad cross-section of machine tools can take advantage of it, that it’s applicable to a broad cross-section of the market, and that the technology is bulletproof. I don’t want our users to feel like Beta testers for our product.

Does this licensing strategy work well for you and your customers?

Coleman: In most cases, a company would almost have to buy four separate CAM systems to get a best-of-class solution for milling,  turning, EDM, and sheet metal. End users prefer not to do that. Our solution allows us to offer a full suite of best-of-class solutions while offering ongoing enhancements because we use these third-party leverages. If our end users come to us and, based on a transition in the manufacturing market, they tell us there is a feature and function they must have, we will search globally for a best-of-class solution and acquire it in the form of a license agreement. This is a process that we’ve developed over a long period of time that works very well for us. We prefer to license rather than start a two-year development cycle. For example, we license the SolidWorks solid modeler instead of trying to develop all that technology on our own. I feel that it’s a best-of-class product.

Does CAMWorks work directly with SolidWorks?

Coleman: Yes, CAMWorks runs inside of SolidWorks. However, most machine shops consider CAMWorks a stand-alone package. A machine shop may not care about the solid modeler, but they certainly need an import platform to import design files. Obviously, SolidWorks has some of the best translators on the market, so our users can import any MCAD file and generate the toolpath. If they decide to design some tooling or make some modifications, they have a best-of-class solid modeler. In fact, the price point for CAMWorks with SolidWorks included is very competitive when compared to other CAM systems that don’t include a best-of-class solid modeler. Because of our third-party licensing strategy as well as our association with Geometric Software solutions in India, we can offer this attractive price point. In the near future, we will also offer associativity with most MCAD files. Associativity will recognize any changes in the original part whether from Inventor, Solid Edge, and so on and ask if the programmer wants to automatically update the toolpath to accommodate the change.

What are some new features in your recent release of CAMWorks 2006?

Coleman: CAMWorks 2006 includes our best-of-class FabWorks sheet metal product plus four productivity utilities. The first one is CAMWorks eDrawings, which is a compression algorithm that compresses a solid model by about 95 percent to make it easy to e-mail. We took eDrawings, which is a GSSL product, and made it relevant to the CAM community. Now you can e-mail a solid model with a toolpath on it so that shop personnel or subcontractors can actually see the tool motion. The viewer is free and it’s included in the e-mail. You don’t have to download or install anything. Depending on the permissions that the sender has given you, you can measure the model, explode it, rotate, pan,  zoom, add annotations to it, and send it back.

The second utility is called CAMWorks PartFinder. It’s a search engine for parts libraries just like a standard Web search engine. Let’s say you’re a job shop that’s quoted thousands of parts and ABC Corp. has sent you a solid model to quote. You can use the solid the customer sent you as a key solid just like a keyword in Yahoo or Google and PartFinder will search your parts library for a similar or identical part, displaying 10 matches per page. You can then open the part file and compare the two parts side by side with the third utility,  which is called CAMWorks Difference-Finder.

The DifferenceFinder will highlight the geometric differences between the two solid models. CAMWorks has associativity, which will apply the toolpath from the part that’s in your part library and update it based on the new part file. If there are any new features, CAMWorks will automatically apply the defined machining sequences as set up by the user in the technology database.

Finally, we have CAMWorks FeatureFinder. On imported models that do not contain features, FeatureFinder performs automatic feature recognition to create intelligent SolidWorks features. Although CAMWorks does not require SolidWorks features, if the model contains SolidWorks features, the geometry can be easily modified if required. These four productivity utilities are available as a bundle for our intermediate and advanced users.

What do you see in the future of CAM software?

Coleman: There is definitely a trend to reduce the amount of human interaction required by a CAM system for exactly the reasons we already discussed: the aging workforce and a lack of experienced manufacturing engineers. TekSoft has a division that does nothing but help companies automate their machining processes. The team looks at your processes,  looks at your families of parts, and determines the best way to completely automate as much of the work as possible so there is no human interaction. Everything is automated. A manufacturer gains the added benefit of productivity, but the primary driver is the lack of knowledge. Companies have to capture the knowledge they have today before their workforce retires.

For example, mold bases have standard prismatic shapes like holes and pockets. It’s all 2D stuff. We have customers right now that have all the knowledge-based manufacturing tools in place so that the only work they have to do is generate the solid model for the mold base. They already have a standard machining setup with standard tools, so then they only need to recognize the machinable features and let the technology database generate an operation plan,  assign feeds and speeds and depths of cut, etc.  The machine operator clamps the stock to the table and off it goes. Is it possible at this time to do that with 4-axis or 5-axis? No, it’s not. Will it be in the future? We absolutely see that as the trend.

Ann Mazakas is the owner and president of Intelligent Creations LLC, a provider of services to the manufacturing industry. Send your comments about this article via e-mail by clicking here.

Company Highlights

Company:    TekSoft, Inc.
Headquarters:    Scottsdale, Arizona
Founded:    1981
Products:    CAMWorks