Troy, New York - September 29, 2003 - STEP Tools, Inc. announced today it will attend the last 2003 gathering of the worldwide ISO STEP community. This international team of more than 200 data structure experts meet three times per year to maintain and advance STEP (Standard for Product Data Exchange) and STEP-NC standards. The meeting will be held in Poitiers, France on October 26 - 31, 2003. STEP Tools spearheads the development of STEP-NC effort in North America, and has been a highly visible participant in the global STEP community for over fifteen years. Dr. Martin Hardwick, president and CEO of STEP Tools, is the international team leader of the STEP Manufacturing group. Dr. David Loffredo, STEP Tools' Vice President of Product Development, is the deputy leader of the working group responsible for STEP Implementation Methods.
Dr. Hardwick will convene with the STEP Manufacturing team and deliberate top implementation issues for STEP-NC, the emerging new standard for product design and manufacturing data. The team will further discuss and define Conformance Classes for STEP-NC, and move forward to conclude open issues that will generate a vote to establish STEP-NC as an official Draft International Standard.
To better integrate the manufacturing process and allow more flexible use of CNC machine tools, STEP Tools has spent the past three years developing a STEP-NC software environment for an intelligent manufacturing system that shares data between product design, process planning and machine tool controllers. By infusing a high level of "intelligence" in machine tool controllers, much of the manufacturing process can be automated and processed within the same database through the use of a full fidelity STEP-NC model. The company has established a STEP-NC Implementer's Program and software solutions for early adopters of STEP-NC technology.
STEP-NC is anticipated to eliminate the most troublesome bottlenecks to manufacturing productivity - cumbersome post processors, antiquated G & M codes, data redundancies, multiple CAD files, and more. The international standard is expected to usher in a new era of manufacturing automation in terms of productivity, safety, reliability, and CNC machine tool usability and interoperability.