We sat down with Regan Coventry Customer Experience Manager from AC Australia CAD CAM Solutions to ask the questions we know a lot of ALPHACAM users are quietly wondering about, what Automation Manager actually does, whether it’s worth the setup effort, and what happens after you’ve got it running. Here’s what he had to say.
Q: For someone who’s never used it, what does Automation Manager actually do?
Automation Manager is a powerful module that brings all the different functions of Alphacam together so they can be performed automatically to process your CAD files through to NC Code. You can set up a configuration for each machine so that every time you send a job to it, the same rules apply automatically. Whether that’s squaring off-cuts, saving them into your material library, flipping parts for reverse side machining or turning unusable pieces into waste ready to bin. You can build multiple configurations too, so you might have one setup for standard jobs and a different one for a special job that needs to be handled differently. You set it up once, and it does the job for you every time, or you can step in and tweak settings for individual jobs when you need to.
Q: How much control do you actually have once it’s automated?
More than people expect. Automation Manager isn’t a black box — you’re setting the rules it follows, and you can step in and adjust any job individually whenever you want. If something needs special treatment, you build a separate configuration for it, so the standard jobs keep running automatically while the exceptions get handled the way you’d handle them manually. We also help get it dialled in properly from the start, so you’re not second-guessing the setup later. Some customers go fully hands-off; others prefer to stay closer to the process. Either way works.
Q: How much time does it actually save someone doing this manually right now?
More than people expect. If you’re manually importing or drawing each part, tooling, nesting, generating toolpaths and outputting reports, each of those steps can take five minutes or more on its own, so you could easily be looking at the best part of an hour per job in repetitive processes. Automation Manager does all of that in a couple of minutes once it’s set up. It’s the people who’ve been running ALPHCAM for years without ever adopting Automation Manager, still nesting and outputting everything by hand, who stand to save the most.
Q: Beyond speed, is there any other benefit people don’t think about?
Record-keeping, actually. When people draw a job manually, the file often gets saved somewhere and eventually forgotten about, so it may not be easy to find six months later. Automation Manager keeps track of every job that passes through it and can be sorted by customer, so if someone calls back wanting a small change or a repeat of an old job, you’re not digging through folders. You go straight to it: here are the parts and the settings that were used and here are the reports and NC code. It becomes a proper record of the work, not just a design file.
Q: Is it hard to set up yourself?
It does depend on the scope of your business but realistically, we wouldn’t recommend most people try to set it up solo. Being an automated solution, there are multiple areas were settings need to be configured, and everything needs to be configured correctly before it produces a usable result. That’s where we come in: we’ll typically spend a day of consulting getting it set up to a solid working standard based on your companies’ requirements, followed by a couple of three-hour training sessions. From there you’re off and running, and if you want to do more with it down the track, we’re on hand to show you.
Q: How is that different to just buying software from anyone else?
It’s the difference between buying a licence and having a partner. A lot of software providers, including some of our overseas competitors, sell you the subscription and that’s it. You get some online tutorials and you’re on your own if something doesn’t work the way you expected. We’d rather sit down with you, understand how you actually operate, so the software works for you. Once it’s set up, we’re always here to support you and help you get the most out of it.
Q: Who tends to get the most value out of Automation Manager?
Honestly, it’s the customers who’ve been with ALPHACAM the longest and never made the jump, the ones still manually nesting, manually outputting code, manually generating reports because “that’s what they’ve always done.” Once they see it running properly, the feedback is consistently the same: it takes all that time spent on repetitive tasks out of the job, and once you know how to fine-tune it, you get even more out of it.
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