Saint Petersburg's Jewelry Plant "Alfa" uses Delcam's ArtCAM

The use of Delcam’s ArtCAM JewelSmith CADCAM software has increased the speed of jewellery design and manufacture at Saint Petersburg’s Jewelry Plant "Alfa". In addition, the software allows designers to present quickly several variants of any new design, together with prototype models, to a customer so they can make a final decision on the piece.

Jewelry Plant "Alfa” was founded in Saint Petersburg towards the end of 1992. Now it is one of the largest jewellery enterprises in Russia, employing more than 200 professional specialists in various aspects of jewellery. However, the company’s products have a much longer history. The factory is part of the Fabergé tradition through its exclusive agreement with Tatiana Fabergé, granddaughter of Carl Fabergé, to use the trade mark "The Imperial Collection by Tatiana Fabergé”. It also has the right to manufacture copies of pieces from the Hermitage collection in coordination with the museum’s arts council.

The ArtCAM software is used together with a 3D scanner and a Roland CNC milling machine. "Using our ArtCAM software enables us to save a lot of time when creating repeated elements of designs,” said one of the Plant’s leading designers, Alexey Marfichev. "In addition, ArtCAM is unbeatable in creating text and geometric shapes that brought a lot of headaches in our previous manual design process. The flexibility of the software allows us to use different source data, such as manual artwork, scanned data, and 2D computer designs, to get final models for products of practically unlimited complexity.”

"ArtCAM JewelSmith software has been successfully used in our company for more than five years so we’ve gained the experience to be able to solve practically any problems in the design and manufacture of new items in very short timescales,” he added. "The new functionality in the later versions has increased our capabilities even more, simultaneously opening new horizons for creativity in our designs. Now, we can’t imagine a design process that didn’t use modern computer technologies.”