In 1988 Karl Fischer of Killion Industries met with Frank Rubino of CIM-TECH.COM, Inc. At that time, there was no automated form of CAM software available for the woodworking industry that met Killion Industries requirements. Killion manufactures store fixtures and interior packages for the retail food and fast casual dining industries. Its primary product lines include supermarket checkouts, commercial refrigerators & freezers, and specialty department product merchandising fixtures. From a CNC machine/ CAM software package stand-point, the technology simply had not been developed for the woodworking industry. However, the metalworking industry was already well down the path of this line of thinking for automating repetitive processes.

After Karl shared with Frank what Killion was looking for, Frank explained that he had the same idea, but the concept needed further development. Killion offered CIM-TECH to assist in working out the bugs from the beta software to help provide input as to how this software could best be utilized in a high-volume woodworking manufacturing environment in exchange for allowing Killion to be first on the cutting edge of leading technology.

Killion stated that Router-CIM Automation Suite has reduced the Engineering Department labor by eliminating the need to employ a formal CAM Engineer. The design engineer’s time is productively spent toward product development rather than spent instructing machines how to make parts after the product is developed. By following a small set of in-house rules, most CAM jobs processed require very little human intervention to process from CAD parts to fully optimized nests of NC code. Truly performing automated CAM is like having a second shift that never complains and works for free.

Killion Industries recently purchased CIM-TECH’s newest innovation Solid-CIM 3D which solves a major problem in the push to use solid modeling in their designs. Solid-CIM 3D utilizes Automatic Feature Recognition that works directly on 3D solids and 3D solid assemblies to lay parts flat and identify required machining operations. It also creates programs for any CNC machine complete with a cut list of all parts, material usage reports, tooling consumption,and cycle time estimates.This helps create more accurate bids and increase efficiency. KIllion is excited as they move forward into the solid modeling arena.

There is no doubt that CIM-Tech’s software has played a critical role early on in the development of Killion Industries’ operating practices. CIM-Tech has helped Killion Industries perform at a “best available technology” level ever since.