Diakont Group

Diakont Group, a high-tech equipment manufacturer in the industrial machinery sector, faced growing manufacturing complexity as its fleet of numerical control (NC) machine tools expanded significantly in 2011 and 2012. With increasing NC tool counts, shop floor programming became operationally unsustainable — operators lacked the toolpath sophistication to fully exploit machine capabilities, creating a bottleneck between design intent and manufactured output. Non-compliance issues accumulated as disconnected CAD and CAM environments forced manual handoffs, introducing errors in NC code generation. Without integrated design-to-manufacturing workflows, complex parts required excessive rework, eroding productivity and extending time to market.

Diakont selected Siemens NX CAM as its primary manufacturing planning platform, chosen specifically because its CAM functionality better leveraged the capabilities of the company's NC machine tools than competing solutions. A phased deployment approach was taken — beginning with Siemens Solid Edge for design across nearly all projects, then integrating NX CAM for NC code generation across multiple equipment types. The native integration between Solid Edge and NX CAM eliminated the need for data translation between design and manufacturing planning environments. Diakont utilized NX CAM's full feature set: solid modeling, assembly creation, machining of assemblies, drafting for manufacturing drawings and setup charts, turning operations programming, and multi-spindle support. Critically, NX's postprocessor natively supported Diakont's specific controllers, removing the need for manual postprocessor corrections.

The integrated Solid Edge and NX CAM environment delivered measurable gains across quality and productivity:

• 70% reduction in non-compliance — eliminating the majority of NC code errors that previously required shop floor correction
• 50% increase in productivity for design and manufacturing planning on complex parts

Beyond the headline numbers, Diakont eliminated shop floor programming as a workaround, moving NC code generation upstream into a controlled engineering environment. The seamless CAD-to-CAM data flow reduced manual intervention at handoff points, and native controller support meant postprocessor output required no manual correction — accelerating programming cycles and improving first-pass accuracy.

• Integration between CAD and CAM environments is a force multiplier — the productivity gains at Diakont came not from either tool alone, but from eliminating the friction between them.
• Controller-specific postprocessor support is a critical vendor selection criterion — manual postprocessor corrections introduce errors and consume engineering time that compounds across high NC tool counts.
• Phased adoption reduces implementation risk — Diakont's step-by-step CAD-then-CAM rollout allowed teams to build competency before expanding scope.
• Moving NC programming off the shop floor improves quality control — upstream programming in an engineering environment catches errors before they reach machining.