COBHAM, London, Mar 11, 2026 – Hexagon marks 50 years of RADAN, a sheet metal CAD/CAM solution that has remained in continuous development and daily production use by manufacturers for five decades.
First developed in 1976, RADAN was created to solve a practical production challenge: how to verify punch press programmes offline before material reached the machine. While fabrication technologies, machine capabilities and commercial pressures have changed dramatically since then, the underlying challenge has remained the same, even as the tolerance for error has narrowed significantly.
For 50 years, RADAN has evolved alongside its customers, adapting to new machine technologies, shifting supply-chain dynamics, and changing workforce realities. Its longevity reflects a consistent ability to absorb complexity on behalf of manufacturers, helping them protect margins, reduce risk, and achieve or exceed their operational ambitions as production environments become faster, more automated, and more constrained.
“In sheet metal manufacturing, longevity only matters if you keep earning trust,” said Olaf Körner, Product Manager at Hexagon’s Production Software Division. “RADAN has remained relevant because it continually adapts to manufacturing reality. As machines become more capable, material costs more volatile and skill availability more uncertain, manufacturers need dependable preparation they can rely on, not disruption.”
Evolving with manufacturing reality
Modern fabrication environments are shaped by mixed machine estates, tightening margins and increasing pressure on skilled labour. Automation has raised productivity expectations, but it has also increased the cost of error. Material waste, unplanned rework, and lost machine time now carry immediate commercial consequences across the supply chain.
RADAN supports punching, profiling, nesting, and bending workflows across a wide range of fabrication environments, helping manufacturers harness machine complexity while keeping it away from day-to-day users. By embedding machine-specific logic, tooling intelligence and verified workflows, RADAN captures operational expertise and makes it repeatable, even as personnel, machines, and production demands change.
This focus on continuity extends earlier in the process. With margins under sustained pressure, quoting and planning decisions must be grounded in real manufacturability and verified toolpaths. RADAN links preparation, costing and verification within a unified application environment, helping manufacturers ensure that work accepted is both profitable and achievable before material is committed, while maintaining flexibility as schedules, priorities, and demand shift.
Material volatility further reinforces the need for reliable preparation. In an uncertain global environment, efficient nesting, controlled profiling strategies, and reduced scrap directly protect margin sheet by sheet. RADAN’s preparation tools help manufacturers plan with confidence, even as availability, pricing and lead times fluctuate
Evolving together over time
Long-standing customer adoption continues to validate RADAN’s approach to continuous improvement before production begins.
“Many of the companies using RADAN started small,” said Körner. “Over the years, we have grown with them through periods of real turbulence, from the financial crisis in 2007 to the disruption of COVID more recently, which fundamentally reshaped how fabrication businesses operate. Each time, customer priorities changed: material became harder to source, margins tightened, skilled people were harder to find, and tolerance for error dropped. Our customers did not stand still through these moments, and neither did RADAN. It has evolved alongside our customers, adapting to help them stay agile, protect their business, and continue growing, even when the industry itself was changing around them.”
At UK-based fabricator Lasershape, RADAN has evolved from a nesting tool into the production engine behind Hyperlight, the company’s 24/7 automated quoting and order platform.
Hyperlight removes manual interaction from part import, geometry validation, and nesting, allowing customers to receive instant, production-aligned quotes at any time of day. Crucially, those quotes are not theoretical estimates. They are driven directly by RADAN’s validated nesting logic and enhanced by operational rules that reflect real-world machine performance.
“We needed the basics to be absolutely bulletproof,” said Jason George, Managing Director at Lasershape. “If you’re going to have code talk to the system and get an answer back, it has to be right every time.”
By automating part validation, geometry clean-up, and nesting through RADAN’s API, Lasershape has stabilised quoting and planning across the business. Material waste has reduced by approximately 15%, profiling times for 3mm aluminium sheets have improved significantly, and quoting capacity has moved from manual office hours to continuous availability.
Importantly, the objective was not workforce reduction, but margin protection through consistency: “We want to grow, but not by getting our people to do more work, faster,” George added. “We want to grow by letting people focus on where they add the most value. What we’re trying to do is automate the processes that can be automated and then put people where they belong, providing value.”
By stabilising preparation and quoting, Lasershape has strengthened its ability to accept work with confidence, protecting profitability while redeploying skilled people to higher-value engineering activity.
“What Lasershape demonstrates is how preparation software becomes the foundation for scalable digital services,” said Körner. “When the underlying engine is reliable, manufacturers can build confidently on top of it, whether that’s automation, quoting or new customer models.”
Looking ahead
As RADAN enters its sixth decade, development continues to focus on practical priorities that reflect modern fabrication realities: automation that removes repetitive preparation effort, stronger traceability to support repeatable production, and workflow support for increasingly complex punching, profiling, and bending environments.
New capability is introduced in a way that protects validated programmes and established processes, allowing manufacturers to adopt change at their own pace without destabilising production.
RADAN’s 50-year milestone is positioned not as a retrospective, but as evidence of an engineering approach that continues to deliver value where it matters most, before production begins.
About Hexagon
Hexagon is the global leader in precision technologies at any scale. Our digital twins, robotics and AI solutions are transforming the industries that shape our reality.
Hexagon (Nasdaq Stockholm: HEXA B) has approximately 24,800 employees in 50 countries and net sales of approximately 5.4bn EUR. Learn more at hexagon.com and follow us @HexagonAB.
