One of the most skilled operations in the sheet metal manufacturing industry is the operating and setting of press brakes, which if you are a low batch manufacturer could increase your non value added time significantly. Skill shortages for this operation don’t help and when you consider that you could easily have 2-3 press brakes feeding from one profile cutting machine along with the fact you may spend longer setting the machine than producing! It becomes a clear area for opportunities to increase throughput, improve quality metrics and ultimately drive down cost.

“Why is Press Brake Operation so Skilled?”

There are few factors involved, a key area is having a good skilled operator with lot of experience with working out bend cycle and having a clear understanding of tooling and types along with a detailed knowledge of the machine capabilities.

“So what improvement options are there?”

More modern press brakes are capable of supporting offline programming, which are usually shipped with the manufactures own brand software, however this is really only effective if you only use one supplier for profile cutting and bending and don’t ever plan on changing as the result will be multiple software packages which in turn increases your front end time and makes it harder to keep your skill set at a consistent level within the business.

“What can we do to help?”

The MetaCAM and MetaBEND products from Metamation are designed around sheet metal cutting and bending operations and support a very large range of machines that are in today’s market. These products also fully support the significant changes with more use of 3D software’s such as SolidWORKS ©, SolidEDGE © and Autodesk Inventor © to design parts. These formats along with a multitude of other ones can be directly imported and can easily create bending programs along with tooled parts and nests.

“What are the Real Benefits?”

Easily run manufacturing viability checks before instigating time and materials making proto-types.

Work with 3D formatted files so you can view the parts as they were designed without loss of information with converting to a 2D format.

Quickly calculate bending programs for modern and older press breaks with a variety of export methods.

One software solution for bending and cutting for your business.

One software solution that is designed and developed by one company, no rebranding and no additional interfaces, gadgets, gizmos or widgets to get things to work.