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 ma nufacturing sheet metal tooling. Many commercially available CAD/CAM system s are either too expensive or too narrow in scope, in the sense that they p rovide only point solutions. The design of press tools and its manufacturin g 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 sheer metal tooling company spec ialising in precision punches and dies. A PC-based system has been implemen ted on an AutoCAD platform using the Autolisp programming language.