Benefits of CAPP

 Let us try to understand what the benefits of CAPP are. We may list out the following benefits of CAPP:

1. Improved rationalisation and standardisation of plans.

2. Increased productivity.

3. Reduced time to production.

4. Increased integration of design and manufacturing.

Implementation of either a variant or generative CAPP system forces a firm/organisation to standardise their process planning procedures. This standardisation must reduce, if not eliminate, process planning errors and improve overall plan consistency relative to manual systems. A variant system try to augment the process planners skills, not replace them. A generative system, on the other hand, theoretically could take over process planning of simple parts, leaving the planner to denote time to more complex planning tasks. The increased productive of CAPP systems should also reduce the time required to move a product into production.

"Fully Automated Factory" or in other words "unmanned factory" has been a major and long-term goal of the people both from industry and academia for a long time, although some authorities claim that it is impossible to achieve. CAD and CAM are two of the most important activities to be amalgamated in a typical automated environment. Due to developments in computer technology, robots and computer controlled automation in CAM and CAD systems,, numerically controlled equipment,  many manual functions have been automated, thus resulting in reduction of lead times, improvements in production and improvement in manufacturing quality. However, the full integration of CAD and CAM systems in industry has not yet been achieved. One of the most important obstacles to be overcome is the automation of process planning activities that bridges CAD to CAM. The CAPP was first proposed by Niebel. Schenck supported the CAPP idea of Niebel by his Ph.D dissertation at Purdue University in 1996. Due to the limitation of computer hardware and software, the CAPP had not been feasible until the early 1980s. CAPP is very inclusive and basically consists of the determination of processes and parameters required to convert a blank into a finished product. The key elements of process planning include; material selection, operation selection, machine tool selection, operation sequencing, cutting tool selection, set-up selection and design, etc.

Computer aided process planning accomplishes these tasks of process planners by viewing the total operation as an integrated system, so that the individual operations and steps involved in making each part are coordinated with each other and are performed efficiently and reliably. This process is done with the help of computers.

Today, it has been recognised that Computer Aided Process Planning is the key for promoting the integration of CAD and CAM systems. It has been seen as the only tool for removing the slash between CAD/CAM.

Process planning forming the link among CAD and CAM, in fact translates the design language into the manufacturing language. There have been a great number of efforts and studies to attain the major goal via CAPP; to effectively integrate the design and manufacturing, by providing the automation and standardisation of the process planning function. Though, it is worth noticing that the industrial utilization and applications of the developed CAPP systems are quite restricted. One of the main reasons behind this lack of industrial use is that the process planning is a complexes and divergent task including several sub-activities from the interpretation of the product data to the tool path planning and CNC part program generation, and among these sub-activities there are many highly complex and ill-defined relationships. Another reason might be the differences between the supposed conditions and real conditions on the shop floor, or unexpected disturbances, or continuously changing demand, or enhanced technology. The performance and applicability of the CAPP systems might be improved by including a higher number of the real manufacturing variables and by providing an adaptive structure to the system.