Press Release
For immediate release
19th January 2006
JETCAM International is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2006 and the continuing success of its range of CADCAM and automation products.
Originally formed in Australia in 1986 the JETCAM group of companies now services over 20,000 licenses across 70 countries worldwide. The company relocated to Europe in 1989 to concentrate on its growing customer and dealer base and has since established itself as a world leader in the field of CNC CADCAM automation.
Said Ivan Stern, CEO and co-founder of the company; “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.”
Ivan continued; “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 Ltd 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 - which Stern puts down to a change in customer philosophy. “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 Remote Control Processing (RCP) module, which allows JETCAM Expert to be controlled externally from other applications such as MRP/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 new free form (true shape) high performance nesting module (FFHPN), which yields up to 15% material saving over other nesting algorithms. It also expanded its product functionality to cover routing and composite cutting requirements – where, with respect to the latter, one user even advised that the system had paid for itself in just over four weeks due to massive material savings achieved.
In 2005 JETCAM continued its stready growth and signing new dealers around the world, including significant expansion in the Americas through NestONE Solutions, a new dealership created by some of the best known, most knowledgeable and respected individuals in the business. JETCAM Orders Controller Version 6 was also released, allowing users to quickly compile assemblies of component orders to then be passed to JETCAM Expert for interactive or fully automatic processing.
Commented Martin Bailey, Group Marketing Manager; “2006 promises to be another exciting year for JETCAM. Our worldwide reseller conference is scheduled for March in Monaco, and we have exciting new product functionalities due for release during the year. JETCAM Expert is subject to constant and rapid development, the results of which will continue to provide increased savings and other benefits to our customers worldwide.”
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