Advantages of CAPP and there future trends.

CAPP has some important advantages over manual process planning which includes:-

1. Reduced process planning and production lead-times.
2. Faster response to engineering changes in the product
3. Greater process plan accuracy and consistency
4. Inclusion of up-to-date information in a central database
5. Improved cost estimating procedures and fewer calculation errors
6. More complete and detailed process plans
7. Improved production scheduling and capacity utilization
8. Improved ability to introduce new manufacturing technology and rapidly update process plans to utilize the improved technology

There are number of difficulties in achieving the goal of complete integration between various functional areas such as design, manufacturing, process planning and inspection. For example, each functional area has its own stand-alone relational database and associated database management system. The software and hardware capabilities among these systems pose difficulties in full integration. There is a need to develop single database technology to address these difficulties. Other challenges include automated translation of design dimensions and tolerances into manufacturing dimensions and tolerances considering process capabilities and dimensional chains, automatic recognition of features and making CAPP systems affordable to the small and medium scale manufacturing companies.