LEAD FEATURE THE FUTURE OF SUBCONTRACT MACHINING
guaranteed” to work, not requiring the attendance of a
person through the rst cycle. And, of course, this
reduced programming requirement also addresses the
skills challenge. There are far more NC programmers
retiring than are being trained, Saville advises.
What this means is that for small quantities or
prototypes, you can “vastly reduce the cost” and deliver
the component to a customer faster. And with a cycle
time that is at least twice as fast as what might have
been created, the costs also plummet, and that will be
achievable in just a few months’ time, he offers.
But he poses the rhetorical question “So why hasn’t
this been done before?” Because it is “phenomenally
complex”, he answers, adding: “This is probably one of
the hardest pieces of technology being built in
manufacturing right now.” Part of the solution is the
power of cloud computing, but shear horsepower is not
the answer, it required many areas of development,
including “completely new ways of representing geometry
in a computer”, plus venture capital backing to the tune
of £11.35m since 2016, with a further round of fund
raising scheduled for next year. That support has allowed
the operation to attract “the truly best software
engineers in the world to solve this problem, which
cannot be solved with just a lot of regular software
engineers...requiring the development of a whole new
computer science”.
USE IT DON’T SELL IT
Yet the company is not going to sell this software;
instead it is going to use it to support the creation
of a global network of manufacturing companies that
can exploit it and so deliver a service that others
simply cannot match. And it already has its rst
factory operational. A 25,000 ft2 set-up in
Chelmsford, opened in January this year (see
extended online article) that is already serving
customers with parts that are made “faster,
better and cheaper, using CloudNC
technology core software and everything
else we are building around it”. And that last
part of the statement is also important.
By controlling the environment within which
the software is applied, the variation that the
software would have to accommodate were it
to be sold to rms having many different types
of equipment is eradicated, the CEO
underlines, which means that software
development can be highly focused. And the
standardisation of the manufacturing
environment also offers a second bene t –
the ability to optimise all other elements of
the manufacturing process chain, he adds.
One of those is the automation of quoting,
which can go from a process taking days or
weeks to one that is instant and automatic.
In addition to that bene t of a standardised
manufacturing environment, with known manufacturing
times, he says: “You can do very interesting things
around scheduling your factory that are just not options
available to anybody else...You can build all this
technology that makes the entire process, from sending
a quote out to getting the component to the customer,
hyper-ef cient because you have unlocked this
automation at the core.”
CloudNC’s rst factory, while earning some money by
producing parts is, in fact, really the focus for
“developing a scaleable model, a blueprint of massive
automation and ef ciency that is designed to be
‘cookie cutter copy and pasted’ across the world”.
And that scaleable roll-out of factories will start
following the next round of funding in 2020 “very
quickly”. He suggests that there could be four
factories by the end of next year.
A big enough vision? Big, but not the ultimate
destination, Saville reveals. “Our ultimate vision is
somewhat bigger. CNC machining was just the obvious
starting point for us, because it is a phenomenally
valuable problem to solve; really dif cult, but we gured
it would be just about possible. It turned out to be
much, much harder than we thought it would be – we
thought we would be where we are today about three
years ago. But what we really want to achieve is full
automation of the manufacturing of primary
Above: The
computer suite at
Chelmsford, where
NC programming
software is both
applied and
refi ned
Left (L-R): CloudNC CTO Chris Emery
with company CEO Theo Saville
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