There is a conversation that happens on a lot of shop floors, usually when a SolidCAD engineer is on site for something else.
Someone mentions they have been quoting a seat of CAD so the programmer can open a customer model and fix a bad fillet without going back to the client. The engineer asks what their CAM subscription is. FeatureCAM, they say. Or PowerMill.
And the answer is: you already have it.
This is not a sales line. It is a line item. Autodesk's own product page for FeatureCAM lists what the subscription contains: FeatureCAM Ultimate, PartMaker, Autodesk Fusion, Autodesk Fusion Contributor and HSMWorks. The PowerMill subscription likewise includes access to Fusion and to advanced manufacturing capability through Fusion extensions. For a large number of Canadian shops, Fusion has been sitting in the Autodesk Account portal, unused, for years.
So the useful question is not whether to get Fusion. It is what to do with the one you are already paying for, without touching the programming workflow your team is good at.
Most job shops receive geometry they did not create, in a format they would not have chosen, with problems they have to solve before a toolpath can be generated. A missing face. A fillet that will not machine. A model that arrived as a solid when the quote assumed a surface.
Fusion is a full modelling environment, not a viewer. Direct editing, parametric history and surfacing are all there. For the programmer who currently works around a bad model, or waits on the customer, or quietly keeps an old CAD seat alive for exactly this, that is the single most immediate use.
Nothing about this changes where the toolpath comes from. The repaired model goes back into FeatureCAM or PowerMill the same way it always did.
Soft jaws, tombstones, locating plates, inspection fixtures. These get drawn on paper, improvised at the machine, or modelled by whoever happens to have CAD on their desk.
Designing workholding in the same environment where you can see the part, check clearance against the stock and carry the fixture forward as a model is the kind of small, concrete win that does not require anyone to change how they program.
This is the workflow SolidCAD has set up with more customers than any other.
In short: Fusion's inspection capability covers Probe WCS for locating stock and updating work offsets, Part Alignment and Live Part Alignment for compensating fixturing misalignment on complex parts, Probe Geometry for in-process measurement of holes, bosses and surfaces, and Inspect Surface for checking free-form geometry against tolerance. Results can be brought back in from the machine and turned into an inspection report.
A PowerMill shop can keep every roughing and finishing strategy exactly where it is, and use Fusion for the probing cycles and the inspection record.
Quoting, purchasing, quality and the owner all need to look at parts. Today that usually means asking a programmer to stop and open something, or sending a screenshot.
The FeatureCAM subscription includes Autodesk Fusion Contributor, which is a lighter-weight way for people outside the programming seat to open, review and comment on the data rather than asking for it. It is a modest change that removes a surprising number of interruptions.
Tool libraries, preferred strategies, post processor behaviour and setup sheets tend to live on individual workstations and in individual heads. The shop runs well because three people know things.
Centralizing that information does not mean reprogramming anything. It means the knowledge stops being tied to one machine and one person, which matters more every year as experienced programmers retire.
None of these five require a change to how parts get programmed. They are things a shop can start doing with a licence it already holds. The practical question is which one is worth doing first, and that depends on where the time is actually going in your shop.
SolidCAD has supported Canadian manufacturers across mold and die, aerospace, automotive, precision machining and general job shop work for more than three decades. As a Symetri company, we work with the Autodesk manufacturing portfolio every day, including the parts of it customers do not realize they own.
What we usually do first is unglamorous: confirm what is actually in your subscription, confirm who has access, and look at where the hours are going between the model arriving and the part shipping. The answer is often somewhere other than the toolpath.
Autodesk's FeatureCAM product page lists Autodesk Fusion and Autodesk Fusion Contributor among the software included in the subscription, alongside FeatureCAM Ultimate, PartMaker and HSMWorks. The PowerMill subscription includes access to Fusion and to advanced manufacturing capability through Fusion extensions. Check your own Autodesk Account to confirm what is assigned to your users.
No. Everything described here sits alongside your current programming. The CAM software your team knows keeps doing the machining work.
Usually whoever currently loses the most time to something that is not programming. That is often the person repairing customer models or the person coordinating inspection.
Your Autodesk Account shows the products assigned to each named user. If nobody is sure who administers it, that is itself worth sorting out, and SolidCAD can help you read it.
If nobody at your shop can say with confidence what is in your Autodesk subscription or who it is assigned to, that is the place to start, and it takes very little time to answer.
SolidCAD can review what you already hold, show the workflows that fit how your shop actually runs, and help you put one of them in place.
Prefer email? Reach SolidCAD at info@solidcad.ca.
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