[cheekygeek]

Listen to my sad tale and please give me your opinion on the best way to move forward...

I work for an "old school" privately owned machine shop. We've recently built our own CNC machine for cutting parts out of 1/4" steel with a plasma cutter, but other than that, our most "sophisticated" machine is a 3-axis Fanuc Tape Cutter Model D with a Fanuc 6M controller. Currently, our machinist/programmer has to create and manually enter the G-Code program on the controller (although he has a PC nearby that programs are saved on, etc.) Due to the amount of time it takes to manually create the program and enter it into the machine, our machinist/programmer will often do things the old-fashioned way and manually drill a thousand holes on old WWII-era Bridgeport machines (for instance) rather than take advantage of the CNC way with the Fanuc. (He may be right, but there has to be a Better Way... I hope.)

The engineering department is trying to move our conservative owner along into the 21st Century, but we are a "walk before we run" sort of place.

Our engineers use AutoDesk Inventor for CAD. We don't currently use any CAM software for 2.5D milling (which is what I have gathered what we can do with the 3-axis Fanuc would be termed). There are a dizzying number of CAM packages out there but I believe that most of them are like a Swiss Army knife with far more features than we need to do what we currently want to do (try to generate toolpaths and G-Code appropriate for our Fanuc 6M so that our programmer doesn't have to write code from scratch and enter it at the controller).

What software and workflow would you recommend that we consider for improving our situation? We need to show the boss that this will free up manpower or save time and money in the long run, obviously.

[fordav11]

The time taken to create a program will still be faster than doing it manually and it'll be more accurate. So your guy is not thinking with his head.
There are a few easy to use cheaper CAM programs out there. Bobcad or TurboCAD to name a couple.
You won't find a CAM program that will write your program perfectly. It still needs the skills of a CNC programmer to make it work on the specific machine. It may not need much adjustment if the POST is tweaked perfectly but that's rarely the case.
Basically your programmer has to spend some dedicated time and effort to read books and learn the new way using CAM software plus some manual editing. If he's not interested I would suggest you kick your old machinist's ass out the front door and hire a real CNC programmer who knows what to do