The route to the Smart Factory

Lantek has been a leader in software solutions for the sheet metal industry for 35 years. It has accomplished this by helping OEM machine tool manufacturers optimize the functionality and performance of their machines.

Integral to this approach is Lantek’s neutral stance for its OEM partners, giving them the confidence to trust Lantek with information about the individual technology advances each is working to develop. To facilitate this secure coordination, Lantek has established a focused and dedicated department to manage the 150 OEMs it now supports. This special team is giving each OEM individual attention on their Lantek projects and is supporting them in their implementation and market rollouts to ensure the technology works as intended and, that their customers are happy with the results. 

Software development is a long and complex process. Lantek has been developing its sheet metal CAM, ERP and MES software solutions for 35 years. Mostly, its innovations come from long hours working in partnership with sheet metal manufacturers and machine tool builders, incorporating their requirements while anticipating the direction the industry is heading, providing features and innovations that add real value for customers. This knowledge and experience can only be acquired after years working in partnership with machine tool builders.

Over the years, Lantek has developed software to support many new sheet metal devices and technologies including bevelling, drilling, inkjet/laser marking, pallet handling, etc. As these technologies became more common in the market, Lantek implemented generic solutions so that a range of different machines with these capabilities could be driven from Lantek’s standard Expert CAM software simply by configuring the postprocessor to suit the requirements of each machine. There are hundreds of these functions which Lantek has developed with its OEM partners.  Many are now part of the standard ‘Lantek Expert’ system and, as new machine models have been developed, Lantek has customised postprocessors for each of them, irrespective of the OEM, giving Lantek probably the largest library of postprocessors in the industry.

Lantek is fully and strongly committed to its OEM relationships and to software development for future technologies.  Open technology and OEM collaboration are paramount for the success of the sheet metal industry.