Delcam won the benchmark I held here at work. I held a benchmark for CAM software that took about 1 year to complete. We had all the heavy hitters up to bat at that time.
PowerMill and PowerShape is still going strong in the shop. I showed the programmers something about visual Basic 6 and they are now creating fantastic automation programs.
One such program we call it 'cruncher'. You run cruncher and select the IGES model, tell the program which tools to use for roughing prefinishing and finishing. The
VB program connects to PowerMill and completely generates the tool path stratigy and outputs the gcode.
The group made this
VB program so easy to use that they let the shop floor CNC operators use it to create the jobs for the night shift.