INVENTOR MANUFACTURING AUTOMATED PROGRAM I-MAP

A Scale-able Configurator

I worked on the I-MAP program for US Bullet proofing as the project manager. It was designed to automate the manufacturing process for a series of door and window frames.

DESIGN

The IMAP program was designed to implement an automated program application that would provide data to the Inventor CAD system based on customer specifications for selected products.

The application utilized an Excel sheet to drive a series of associative baseline Inventor assembly models of product applications. Feeding the height and width of a product to Inventor, the system then created assemblies that calculate the length, quantity and type of raw stock materials to be used to fill the order. A visual basic program was used to generate XML code and EAN13 USP bar code stickers. The data was then feed to the sawmill seen below to cut to length the piece parts of the frames for the requested model quantity of a given job.

Additional data was then generated by an integrated CNC application for CNC milling operations to provide for manufacture and assembly of the specified product.

The system also provides the bill of materials and shipping ticket.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

The system required the development of several pieces of specialized visual basic programming that generated an XML script. The script directly drove machine equipment on the manufacturing floor. This required that the methodology of the Inventor models be designed to length and add features, rather than create an extrusion and cutting features into the model so that the models of the piece parts drove the manufacturing process.