[step-manufacturing] Slides from Lean Manufacturing Workshop in Seattle

[Martin Hardwick]

All,

The slides from the very successful Lean Manufacturing Workshop
in Seattle are now available for down-load from the STEP Tools
homepage. http://www.steptools.com

I would like to thank all the presenters for the tremendous time
and effort that went into making these slides.

The workshop was divided into four sessions:

In the first session the business case for the STEP Manufacturing
standards was presented.
* An overview all the standards in the suite explaining the purpose
  and role of each in the design to manufacturing process.
* The business case used to justify the deployment of the STEP in a
  UK Navy depot.
* An early implementation study of using STEP as a standard for
  CNC independent tool path data.

In the second sessions key technologies were presented:
* The recently harmonized STEP model for Geometric
  Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T).
* The STEP models for manufacturing features and manufcturing processes.
* the STEP models for CNC machining and tooling.

In the third session some early implementation tools and experiments were
presented:
* A process planning tool developed in Japan.
* A suite of tools for CNC developed in Korea.
* New class libraries to help CAM and CNC vendors implement the
  STEP-Manufacturing standards.

In the fourth session CAM and CNC vendors gave their perspective:
* Unigraphics described their perspective on the opportunities
* GibbsCAM described their perspective on the opportunities
* GE Fanuc described their perspective on the opportunities

A discussion on possible follow-on meetings ended the workshop. The
general consensus reached after the workshop was that the next meeting
should focus on early implementation testing and will be hosted by
the Open Modular Architecture Consortium (OMAC) in Orlando, Florida
on February 2nd and 3rd. More detail will be forthcoming.

Martin Hardwick
Team Leader STEP-Manufacturing
President STEP Tools, Inc.