Thanks for the input guys, it's certainly food for thought. I'm only 4 weeks into the company and don't have the CNC background (boilermaker trade and now engineering) so it's a lot to get my head around but we will be closely working with the guys in the machine shop because as Metallic said, if that guy with all the knowledge leaves the company, you don't want all the knowledge to go with him. So part of the process it to put a system in place to standardize the CNC/CAM process but the other is to lock in and document the structure of the whole operation from quoting through to shipping the product out the door.

G'day all, Our little engineering business is about to enter into the world of Mastercam. We are in the process of installing a Okuma Multus U 3000 into the machine shop and will be using Mastercam to handle the CAM side of things. I am after some advice from someone who has gone through this experience on the process control and integration with the engineering office. We are using Autodesk Inventor and Vault for all our CAD applications and I'm interested to know how others have gone about things like revision control for the CAM programs, protocols for pulling the files from a PDM application and a overarching process to allow their machine shop to run smoothly. Our machine shop side of the business handles production and new design work from the engineering office and manufacturing team but also does a reasonable amount of "jobbing" work that comes in the door. I'm hoping that the integration of Mastercam will be a relatively pain free experience.