CNC machining has come a long way since its early days, with machine tool builders pushing out more and more innovative products every day. They bring with them new features and capabilities, but also a steeper learning curve and new techniques to be mastered. As Brian Francis, our Director of Research & Development tells us, his team have been closely monitoring these developments and providing simple and clever ways to make use of them: “In the end it always comes down to someone sitting in front of a CAD/CAM system and they have whatever sort of tool-path mechanism they have for removing material. And now there’s a machine that has some interesting new way of doing something. Well the CAM system doesn’t respond to that, we in the middle have to respond.”

And respond we have. Since its founding, ICAM has been continuously evolving to meet new market demands, as company President John Nassr explains: “ICAM started in 1971, hiring a few people to provide programming services for 5-axis machines for local manufacturers that had the machinery, but didn’t have the skills or ability to program them. We evolved from there by a adding post-processing, development tools, we did custom post-processors, then we got into plotting and simulation. Now we’ve evolved to a point where we’ve included all these products into one optimized, contiguous flow, Adaptive Post-Processing.”

But just what is Adaptive Post-Processing? It’s our unique methodology that allows you to go from your part program to collision-verified and optimized G-Code in one step by combining post-processing, machine simulation and tool-path optimization. Brian Francis explains just how Adaptive Post-Processing cuts down on CAM programming time: “Its most important thing is that it saves the NC programmer time in front of his CAM system. It takes away some tedium that involves positioning the tool around the part, moving the tool around on the machine. You can waste a lot of time doing that in the CAM world and automating it is an interesting problem, a very difficult problem to solve, and one that I think we’re doing a really good job of. ”

Sam Chehab, Senior VP of Sales & Business Development lays out our goal succinctly: “What we’ve been trying to do is trying to help customers machine their parts and what used to take weeks of programming and days of programming, we’re trying to reduce that to hours or sometimes minutes.” However, getting this kind of performance out of complex multi-axis machines takes a team of sales, training and support specialists that are competent, knowledgable and local. “We have our direct sales team who mainly work out of our office here in Montreal, but we also have established, worldwide, dealers that are able to implement the whole ICAM solution, train customers and those represent, an extension of ICAM really, because they are offering the same type of expertise worldwide.”, he adds.

Along with changes in machine capabilities and software, we’ve seen shifts in other aspects of our operations. ”The main goal of the marketing department is to communicate our products and services to the market. To let them know the benefits of our software and why they should be using it. We’ve been using traditional marketing approaches, magazine advertisements, roadshows but more and more we’re using online media.” says Phil Masella, Marketing & Communications Manager. If you’re looking for more about ICAM, he suggests you start your search by visiting icam.com, before adding “We’re using LinkedIn, we’re using YouTube. We’re going to use comparison videos, we’re also going to show real-life case studies where manufacturers are actually saving time and money implementing these solutions.”

ICAM Technologies Corporation is an international company specializing in the development and implementation of advanced NC post-processing and machine tool simulation solutions for manufacturers in every major industry around the world. For over 45 years, ICAM has been providing aerospace, automotive, medical, heavy equipment and electronic organizations with advanced NC post-processing solutions that have enabled them to increase productivity and achieve greater manufacturing performance and precision.

ICAM’s product line includes: CAM-POST® – a permanent NC post-processing software solution compatible with all major CAD/CAM/PLM Systems. Virtual Machine® – a graphical machine tool simulator depicting the operation and motions of CNC machines during post-processing. Control Emulator(TM) – a software product allowing NC programmers to simulate and test NC programs using G-code inside ICAM’s Virtual Machine and CATIA/DELMIA.

ICAM also offers a complete range of consulting and training services designed to accelerate implementation and promote proven best-practices to help customers achieve their specific manufacturing objectives.