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Product category: CAM, CNC and production management software
News Release from: Jetcam International
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial Team on 23 January 2006

Jetcam celebrates 20th birthday

CNC CADCAM automation firm celebrates 20 years of growth since its formation in Australia in 1986.

CADCAM and automation firm Jetcam is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2006 Originally formed in Australia in 1986, the Jetcam group now services more than 20,000 licences across 70 countries worldwide

The company moved to Europe in 1989 to concentrate on its growing customer and dealer base and has since established itself in CNC CADCAM automation.

Ivan Stern, CEO and co-founder of the company, said: "The idea of Jetcam came about after I tried to get a sheet metal company to produce a component I needed to manufacture".

"I saw the very primitive software tools that they had available and thought there must be a better way than this".

"I discussed the idea with co-founder Bill King and we quickly set about developing a solution".

"Our products have always been about satisfying two apparently contradictory requirements - at one end automating the repetitive, time-consuming and error-prone tasks while at the other still giving the operator full control where desired".

"As a result, the same software is being used interactively by single machine job shops as for totally unmanned operation in multinational companies".

In 1999, the Jetcam group floated on the London Stock Exchange (AIM) and Camtek in the UK joined the group the same year, expanding the product range into milling, turning, wire EDM and multi-axis laser applications.

While subsequent years saw an economic slowdown in manufacturing in general, group sales remained relatively steady.

Stern said: "We identified that many customers were paying more attention to efficiency of their existing equipment rather than investing in new machinery".

"It is sometimes false economy to buy a new machine tool if an update to software can improve machine efficiency, reduce wastage and cut programming time".

In 2003, Jetcam released its RCP remote control processing module, which lets Jetcam Expert be controlled externally from other applications such as MRP and ERP systems.

This level of automation contributed to several high-end sales into multinational aerospace companies.

In 2004, the company reverted to private ownership, and launched a free form (true shape) high performance nesting module, which yields up to 15% material saving over other nesting algorithms.

It also expanded its product functionality to cover routing and composite cutting requirements.

Last year, the firm continued its steady growth and signed new dealers around the world, including significant expansion in the Americas through the Nestone Solutions dealership.

The firm's Orders Controller v6 was also released, so users could compile assemblies of component orders to be passed to Expert for interactive or fully automatic processing.

Martin Bailey, Group Marketing Manager, said "2006 promises to be exciting with our worldwide reseller conference scheduled for March in Monaco, and we have exciting new product functionalities due for release during the year".

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