Bill Gibbs is the founder and president of Gibbs and Associates (Moorpark, CA), developer of GibbsCAM software. He is also president of Cimatron North America (Novi, MI) and vice chairman of Cimatron Ltd. (Givat Shmuel, Israel).
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Programming the Next Generation of Multitasking Machines PASSWORD
Manufacturing Engineering: What are some current devel- opments in manufacturing? Bill Gibbs: There is an ever-growing adoption of higher- productivity equipment in manufacturing in general, so we continue to see a lot of good strength in multitask machining. We see some reshoring going on. Some of our markets in some of our territories have noticeable increases in work being brought back from strange places. This is a good positive sign. There certainly is a growing maturity in our market; we have lot of competitors and a lot of them are good competitors.
would have probably started your business specializing in either mills or in lathes. There would have been a point in your devel- opment where some of these companies would have reached out and acquired the other type of machine, so that they could make both mills and lathes. I was working for a Mori Seiki dealer back when Mori Seiki was only making lathes, and then their first mill came out; this was rather earthshaking that Mori Seiki was now going to offer a mill. It was my first job in this in- dustry. I was at a machine tool dealer called Hasbach, and they were pioneers in providing CNC to Southern California.
“We felt that it was time to make a major investment—and we’ve been working on this probably for over five years—in a new software architecture that wouldn’t have all these classic limitations.”
They’re all trying to catch up and support the ultimate needs of the customer. In CAM software technology, Gibbs and Cima- tron are both investing massively to continue creating better products for our customers, not just to compete for the new customers but also to support all of the existing customers. ME: Your company just introduced GibbsCAM UKM, Uni- versal Kinematic Machine, for complex multitasking. Tell us more about UKM. Gibbs: We saw a need for this in our industry, because even though we’ve been doing MTM [multitask machining] longer than anybody, the machines are evolving in more creative ways. If you were a machine tool manufacturer back in the day, you
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ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com | September 2014
It was a big deal when a mill company started making lathes, or when a lathe company started making mills, but up till not so long ago, these were the two types of machines and people began to associate a machine with the type of machin- ing it did. It turned out to be easier to put a mill tool on a lathe than to put a spindle on a mill, so people started putting mill- ing cutters onto these lathes with powered spindles, and MTM began evolving out of what we would call a lathe architecture. All the early MTM machines, they looked like lathes. When you look at these twin-turret, twin-spindle or single-turret B-axis head machines, the Integrexes, the Mori Seikis, all of these huge MTM machines—they all look like lathes. Some of
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