Moldmaking is precision work, but it’s also expensive and time-consuming. Completing projects quickly is a bottom-line concern for the designers and shops engaged in those project, including automakers — among the most precision- and cost-conscious of all manufacturers. At its plant in Mulhouse, France, PSA Peugeot Citroën relies on Open Mind Technologies’ hyperMILL® CAM/CAD platform to produce aluminum molds and tools for forging and thermoforming operations.

Since adopting hyperMILL, PSA has gained functional advantages that flow from the numerous automation options offered by NC programming. Previously, PSA employees had to write any macros if they may have needed or relied upon to simplify and/or accelerate programming of recurring geometric shapes. Code-writing can be tedious, and the various macros were time-consuming to maintain: they had to be adapted constantly to match new software versions.

In PSA’s search for a new CAM platform, hyperMILL offered numerous options for automated programming, and its intelligent macros are just one example.

“hyperMILL is a forward-looking solution that offers technologies for 2D, 3D, HSC, mill/turn, and 5x machining,” explained Laurent Sifferlen, who is responsible for tool and CAD/CAM quality in the PSA workgroup. “We were impressed by its intuitive user interface, its simple and transparent management of complex processes, and its straightforward way of including user-defined macro instructions and maintaining them in later versions.”

Serge Locher, a programmer at PSA, explained how the PSA programmers were able to automate the transfer of CAD models from CATIA, and discovered in the process that they were able to eliminate all of the sources of errors that can arise during automation, for example, during drilling. “We could reuse our macro instructions for drilling or machining work and use them to create new instructions directly in hyperMILL” Locher noted.