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The Austrian company Forster produces transport technology, shelving systems and noise protection elements for road and rail at several locations in Europe.

At the Sankt Peter factory an automated laser cutting machine PrimaPower® – Lpe8f ‘of the latest generation manufactures the sheet metal parts for the product range.

Forster has been using the WiCAM PN4000 for more than a year to control the Prima-Power machines.

Klaus Weis, the responsible plant manager:

Our previous CADCAM software has not been able to offer the functionality of automatic common line cuts on the new PrimaPower ‘punch fiber’ combination machine.

And after an intensive market investigation, WiCAM’s PN4000 remained the only CADCAM system to provide all the functions we wanted.

WiCAM installed the PN4000 with ERP connection, parametric module and adapted postprocessors for the existing Finn-Power SG6 and the new machine.

The routines for the punch laser combined processing have been reworked so that nesting, island destruction, trimming, trapdoor unloading for waste surfaces and unloading with vacuum cups are fully automated by the algorithms.

Processes for complex special cases are stored in the tool learn mode.

The necessary data for the automatic operation of the LSR vacuum loading, unloading and sorting system as well as for the material storage systems Combo FMS® and Night Train® are generated by PN4000 when the production order is triggered.

Klaus Weis: The programming with the WiCAM solution is much more efficient than with our previous software and actually we are still not using all the possibilities and interfaces in PN4000.

However, the ERP connection and the automatic common line cuttings already give the LPef significant competitive advantages in terms of material use, process reliability and production speed.