Monthly Rewind | April Newsletter
A toolpath programmed at 40 seconds. The machine took over three minutes.
AMRC / Tier 1 Aerospace Case Study – Available as PDF on our website
That gap does not appear in simulation. It appears during prove-out, on a machine that costs £5,000 a day to run. Working with the AMRC, we helped a Tier 1 aerospace supplier make that problem visible before the first cut. Multi-day iteration loops were replaced with analysis completed in under two hours, recovering up to £25,000 in machine capacity per cycle.
April was built around making that kind of analysis faster to access and easier to evaluate. Here is everything we delivered.
Virtual Environment: Try DigitalCNC in a Browser
Your CAM tells you what to cut. DigitalCNC tells you what will actually happen.
The virtual environment is now live. Step through real interactive use cases, select machines, compare strategies and quantify the gap in machine hours, cost per part and total programme impact. No download. No IT clearance. No installation. Register and you are in.
https://digitalcnc.ai/virtual-environment/
Native Integration: Mastercam
DigitalCNC now runs natively inside Mastercam. Siemens NX and CATIA V5 were already supported. Open it inside your CAM environment, select a toolpath, run the analysis. We are actively working on further integrations.
MACH 2026
We launched the virtual environment at MACH. The response was clear: teams want to evaluate toolpath performance against real machine behaviour without committing machine time to find out.
MACH also confirmed two things. Defence demand is drawing complex, tight-tolerance work into programmes that would not have carried that requirement five years ago. And simultaneous five-axis is now a production baseline, but the depth of process knowledge required to run it reliably has not kept pace with the installed base.
Read our key takeaways from MACH here.
ModuleWorks Insider Conference
We attended the ModuleWorks Insider Conference alongside Boeing, Sandvik, Dassault Systemes, Siemens, Mastercam, SolidCAM and a number of engineering-focused companies working on adjacent problems in CAD/CAM and CNC.
The clearest observation from the two days was that machining foundational models remain a long way from production use. That assessment came from the people working most closely on the problem, and it reflects why physics-informed, machine-specific analysis is the correct approach today rather than a position to revisit later.
Read more about what our CEO, Dr Rob Ward has to share about his experience at MIC 2026.
What Your CAM Software Does Not Tell You About 5-Axis Machining
The third session in our webinar series, delivered with experts from the AMRC, is now available in full on YouTube.
The session addresses feedrate fluctuations in simultaneous five-axis work, the conditions under which they produce witness marks and surface defects, and how to identify slowdown zones before the part is on the machine. It covers why three-plus-two is frequently the more reliable choice, how vector programming requires machine-specific validation and what offline testing looks like in practice.
Watch the recording on YouTube.
Cyber Essentials Plus Certification
If you handle sensitive geometry, proprietary process data or supply chain information under contract, the security posture of every tool in your workflow matters.
DigitalCNC has achieved Cyber Essentials Plus certification: independently verified against real-world attack scenarios. For teams operating in defence and aerospace programmes, this provides a recognised benchmark for data protection and supply chain integrity.
We are heading into May with significant partnerships and product announcements. Follow us on LinkedIn to see them first.
