Additive Workflow Management
Engineering Process Management
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CEO NEWS & UPDATES
This page serves as a database for every monthly email that our CEO Andre sends to a handpicked group of people.
These emails serve as a recap for what has been done recently, what's cooking behind the scenes and what are generally. If you're interested in receiving the update, please enter your details below. We'll include you as soon as your entry has been reviewed.
October 2023
3D 💬
I’m on my way to LA (then San Diego, Atlanta [for CamX – on a panel ], Washington [for a talk on AI at ICAM], Baltimore, Philly and NY). Then it’s one day’s rest before heading to Formnext. 😮💨
I can’t complain though, travel has slowed down so much since COVID – which means we’ve been able to focus much more on bizness!! Maybe that explains why the team’s been getting so much done. I’m particularly pleased about the updates this month!
Threads
There’s a particularly special partner announcement for our new engineering collaboration tool! We’ve integrated with Encube to provide users with 3D annotation tools and more. If you’ve not heard of them, that’s because they’ve been very stealthy. It’s a Swedish company with some serious geometry and manufacturing talent, who are trying not only to make online 3D collaboration easier, but are also integrating a high-end manufacturability and design prep tool. They’re focused on CNC for the latter part at the moment, so there’s lots of room to grow together.
For now, we focused on the simplest workflow to allow users to load a 3D CAD file into Threads and jump right into a jam 3D discussion with all of your collaborators in Encube. Comment directly on the CAD and see those comments streamed right back to your related Thread.
We’re super proud to be the first to integrate with them. It allows users to take the collaborative process in the early R&D process to the next level and keep all of decisions and outcomes in Threads.
Flows
There are also some seriously cool new features in our production management tool, Flows. Flows is interesting because it’s more mature and thus gets quite a lot of incremental, ease of life feedback from clients. This is my favorite kind, as it helps us meaningfully improve the platform from real life scenarios – a continuous stress test of the system. This time, we rolled out focused card views for our pieces and enhancements to how we display Work Instructions. It’s never been easier to find who reported what data during the manufacturing process.
Flight boarding ✈️. Hope to see you at one of the many shows or at least in one of the cities I’ll be in in the next few weeks!! Ping me if you’re around!
Andre
September 2023
Autumn Clean 🍂
I’m back in Thorpeness*, the summer home I spoke about last time. We have a habit of getting together twice a year to fix up the house with family. I’m not saying I’m a fan of that habit, but it’s necessary. And in that spirit, we spent the last month doing the inverse of a Spring Clean at Authentise. We now have such a range of products; this actually means a number of things:
Threads
There’s movement in our latest product, and you’ll see more (very exciting) developments there going forward. Last month, we released:
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Enhanced Notifications: Our Threads app can now notify collaborators with In-App, Email, and Desktop Push notifications. This essential step should help solidify our design engineering collaboration platform and ensure that the process remains Agile and nimble. No more lost comments!
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Ownership and Completion: Users can now be assigned as Owners to Thread Events and the whole collaboration team can celebrate the Completion of a Thread!
Digital Design Warehouse
DDW was always an ugly duckling; not really a standalone product at all. No longer. It’s come into its own with a full checkout procedure, thanks to an integration with Stripe – meaning that it can not only be used by those seeking to promote and explore additive internally, but also by those who want to help external partners gain a better understanding of additive, and then use that to order products or samples.
Flows
Last but not least, our biggest product, Flows , is receiving a bit of User Experience TLC, including adding “cards” to more and more pages. We first reported this on the Printer page, and now it’s in the Orders page too. Within the Order Summary you can now see a quick snapshot of the Order’s contents by viewing the Line Item Cards. Click a card to be navigated directly to that Line Item!
In the next couple of emails, I’ll be talking about bigger projects that are underway, but it’s good to know that the team stays reactive to client feedback and manages to get the smaller things out of the way at the same time as executing on the big picture.
I’ll stay in Thorpeness and London for a few weeks but then have some busy travel ahead – including ICAM, CAMX, and Formnext . As always, you can see where our team will be here.
Cheerio,
Andre
*Now that I’ve mentioned Thorpeness twice, I should explain: It’s where my great grandparents met, and the place I spent every summer growing up. It’s one of the few places I knew in the UK until my late teens. And it’s glorious: Built by a friend of the Peter Pan author, JM Barrie, around the turn of the 19th century, it’s conceived as a Victorian Neverland, complete with Cricket, country club, boating lates and a (pebbled) beach. I thought all of England looked like this until I started school near London. It will remain my spiritual home forever, so I’ll be sure to mention it again.
August 2023
Data 🔢
Rather unimaginatively, Happy August Bank Holiday, if you’re in the UK (and happy Labour day next week for you Americans!). Since I spent the last week taking care of some godchildren in our summer escape (Thorpeness, UK -dreamy 🥰) I definitely need a day. Our teams in the UK and the US have deserved the day off too – for more productive reasons. Flows, our main manufacturing process management tool, took a significant step forward in accomplishing our end-to-end vision.
This month, the team released the first version of our environmental sensor integration. This is the first time we’ve added anything other than machine data and adds yet another dimension to the data that we track – alongside design/engineering operations, shopfloor operations and material data. In fact, it’s material genealogy data that we’re augmenting with this feature. In addition to being able to trace all the actions (such as blending, testing (with our new test panel), scraping, sieving, and printing material), we can now store the material in sub-locations (as mentioned in May), and associate environmental data to each of these sub-locations.
For now, we’re using sensors from a company called Pathfinder, which measure humidity, temperature, among others. Flows users are finding that the association of material storage conditions to material batches allows them to trace root cause more easily and study the impact of environmental conditions on material degradation. We’ll be adding additional sensor sources as we go on. Which ones would you like to see?
We added other, more incremental but no less impactful, changes to other systems too. For instance, to the Digital Design Warehouse. That now has a carrousel option, which gives users the ability to add additional images to the existing render of the 3D design. This helps inspire other users to explore additive opportunities, and gives them ta better idea of what a part will look like before ordering.
Now that this is out of the way, and the godchildren have left the building, I should be able to find some time to take August Bank Holiday seriously. Wish me luck for a break in the clouds – and enjoy the last official day of summer and, before then, your time at Formnext, Austin, if you’re there!
Andre
July 2023
New Paths 🐾
Those of you who’ve followed our work for a while will know that we’ve always been interested in exploring how our lessons and tools from the additive world could help in other industries. I’m pleased to report that we’ve been able to make the first steps in in this direction.
Over the last months, the team has been working on transitioning legacy clients of our Elements acquisition last year to Authentise’s main Flows tool. That includes companies like Carpenter, who are now using the tool the manage and streamline the powder production process in the UK. The users there noticed several advantages, including the detailed traceability, ability to tie in manufacturing data directly from machines, and flexibility in the workflow creation.
It's an exciting use of our existing tools, but of course we had to make a couple changes to tune Flows to the needs of powder producers. As you can imagine a “line item” doesn’t quite look the same for them:
Another change was to test our ERP integration skills, which we’ve already documented in this case study. Now, we can also automatically generate Orders and Workflows from files exported from Microsoft’s Dynamics Nav ERP.
Of course, we don’t stop there in our expansion outside of additive. Some of you may have seen me tease our success in securing a large new engagement, search for a new project manager (know anyone?) and a subsequent posting about our day out at the National Composite Centre (what a team 😍)
Can you guess what we’ve got cooking next?
Of course, we’re not about to abandon additive. In fact, after a successful month securing commitments in the industry, we’ve got more drive there than ever before. It’s just a super exciting time to learn and teach more broadly. Join us on the journey and get in touch!
Andre
June 2023
Two Explosions 💥💥
You might think that these rather exclusive updates include everything we’re working on. Of course, that’s not the case. We have some aces up our sleeve 🃏
Two of them dropped this week, and we couldn’t be prouder. You will have heard of them, but just to make sure, let me tell you again:
💥3DGPT💥
This is our first experiment with Large Language Models. We wanted to see whether we could combine existing knowledge (in this case 12,000 standards and journal articles) with one of the large language models that have been all the rage over the past few months. This experiment’s goal was:
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To provide something meaningful to the industry: In this case, a specialized Chatbot that could answer more in-depth questions about the additive industry.
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To understand the limits and opportunities of LLM’s. In fact, we failed with our first attempt (using an open source LLM hosted by us). The second version worked much better. The process taught us a lot about the current state of the art in LLM’s, how to work with them, and the results are teaching us what limits of the models are.
Ultimately, we obviously think there’s a big opportunity in the use of natural language to help guide more effective processes. This was a first step, and a successful one – more than 1000 signups and 1500 questions. To find out more check out our Press Release or give it a try at www.authentise.com/3dgpt. But hurry – it won’t stay up forever.
💥Threads💥
In a way, the second release is related to GPT. Threads is the fulfilment of a decade of learning, and more than a year of incredible work by the team. It’s an engineering collaboration platform that brings together chat and project management, together with resource sharing. It’s focused on those ad-hoc conversations, with ad-hoc teams: R&D, Non-conformance root cause analysis, Field Services.
These types of unstructured issues are usually solved in calls or meetings. Rarely is the context fully captured. That’s because the tools currently available are either really rigid (e.g. PLM) or not traceable (email, whiteboard, etc.). Communication tools (Slack etc.) don't fit the project management need and project management tools (Jira etc.) don't foster collaboration. What was needed was a tool that would make solving ad-hoc challenges a breeze for multi-stakeholder teams.
That’s what Threads is there to solve. As you can see from the Press Release, it’s showing effect: Within 2 weeks, one early test team from a medical company were seeing a 1.5x ROI on their investment, tracking 100% of their R&D decisions digitally, while saving 150 hours and 20 meetings across a distributed team including external partners. They doubled the effective size of their team.
Threads is the big new deal for us. It solves a significant gap in the Digital Thread, allows us to start covering the whole Idea-to-Part process with our workflows and is a significant step for us to take our experience from additive to manufacturing in general. We’re super excited for the future, and not only because we already have plans on how to integrate Large Language Models into the chat features, now that we know how to use them.
If you’re interested in learning more about Threads, check out the website and get in touch if you think it can help you.
There are a number of other exciting projects that are bubbling along in the background – and I can’t wait to share them. Alas, I’ll have to be patient. And so do you 😏
Enjoy summer now that it’s properly started. Hope to talk with you soon.
Andre
MAY 2023
DDW Expands 🪴
It’s great being back in London for the beginning of summer. The density of people excited about finally seeing the sun leads to general euphoria 😁☀️. That, a coronation and lots of public holidays (including today for most of you, which is why I’m sending this a day later than usual). That doesn't mean that we haven’t been busy. We’ve now got a much bigger product portfolio to cover than before: In addition to our main tool (rebranded Flows-AM), we have released a version that covers non-additive processes (Flows), and provide the quoting, material management and model library components as standalone offerings.
This month, the team turned their attention to the model library part of the system – the Digital Design Warehouse. We’ve added significant new features that some of our Flows-AM customers have been demanding for years.
One of them is a Shopping Cart. Previously, folks would start with an order and then add parts. Now they can add parts to a cart, and then check out with the order details.
Users can now also see Libraries dedicated to their specific User Groups. Each of your Groups of users can now be granted access to their own shared Libraries. This can help focus discussions between functional user groups or subdivide your users based on an organization’s Business Segments and Divisions, and protect IP. If a Design has mass appeal, it can also be transferred to the full Company’s library such that All users can access it.
It’s great to see each of the products in the portfolio gain an increasing level of depth and maturity. We’re very intrigued to see what customers ask for next for DDW, RFQ Responder, Materials Managements or Flows.
One thing we do know is that, while you can have conversations about each design and assign other users tasks through our chat feature, the collaboration tools need much more depth if we’re going to speed up the Idea-To-Part (or as somebody called it the Brain-To-Box) process. That’s a challenge we’ve been working on for a year and we’re almost ready to publicly announce. I can’t wait to tell you about it next time.
Until then, enjoy the start of the summer.
Andre
APRIL 2023
Detail 🕵️
Feels like we’re on the move a lot; maybe with the winter over and nobody particularly worried about COVID anymore, the world is waking up from a long slumber. I’ve already been to the states twice in the last 4 weeks (including one very painful 20-hour stint to San Francisco), and am about to head over to South Carolina and Chicago (for Rapid) again. If you’re around, let me know!
It’s busy as things are getting, the amazing team is not losing sight of the detail! Two “detail” updates in this round of improvements.
#1 Are Sublocations. This has been in the works for a while and allows users to create separate facilities for in a specific location. With sublocations they can specify where, for instance a material is stored. It also serves as foundation for future improvements such as “machine rooms” that allow us to project machine performance for certain areas on one screen. We’ll also be able to associate environmental data with a sublocation for greater traceability.
The second detail is an improved work instruction interface. When it was first conceived, work instructions were simple text + SOP links. Now they’re more complex – including various responses, ability to set thresholds, actions against those thresholds and soon, including the ability to include machine data in them too 🥵. So, we had to tidy up the interface. While doing that we also gave folks the ability to review the instructions for each step in a clear, practical way. Take a look!
It’s these types of details that push the whole platform forward. Guidelines, our If-This-Then-That Engine for Manufacturing is one example of that. That has just been shortlisted for the TCT software prize. It’s more than just a recognition of our software development – Guidelines is intricately linked with our mission of placing the operator at the centre of a smart workflow.
I’ll be talking about Guidelines at Rapid on Thursday morning, so come listen if you can. But even if you can’t – it’ll be hard to stop me talking about it wherever we meet.
I look forward to it!
Andre
MARCH 2023
VIEWS 👓
Last minute notes on our releases this month, given how distracted I’ve been by AMUG. For those who made it – it was great to see folks again. I had a lot of fun, especially at the amazing panel on data in operations, and the MES intro + panel. I had a lot of fun on the booth too. Our Goldberg machine was a hit, and while Katie won for enthusiasm, Logan won top prize. He’ll be getting a 3D Printed version of Settlers, which happens to be my favorite board game. Fear not however, we’re planning to start giving those out to anybody who refers us to a new client too so there’s still chance for you. Watch this space!
The Data in Operations panel was particularly insightful. I’d asked Steve Fournier (GKN), Nick Mule (Boeing), and Yan Lu (NIST) to join us. Their presentations (see them here) were great, and Steve advocated for a specialized additive workflow approach, which had me smiling:
I know that this is built on years of experience, trying to make do with standard tools. The three questions we had time to ask involved whether:
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There was any way to apply traditional Six Sigma approaches to additive to which Yan answered that expanded approaches were probably needed, given the additional requirement for data.
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There was a standard definition of a Technical Data Package that involved in-process monitoring (IPM) data, which turned out as a controversial question because Nick said that there wasn’t currently but Steve and Yan seemed to indicate that IPM wasn’t a panacea.
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And finally, the question around data collection at scale. I of course completely forgot to listen to the answers, given how excited I was about the question pointing to a need for Authentise and the MES panel a few days later.
While Derek and I were busy at AMUG, the rest of the team was kicking butt on delivery. This months 2 main features involved giving users a different view of existing data.
The first was the often-requested card view for resources, starting with printers. Time to abandon the list view and see all the relevant data at once. I love it so much, I asked the team to make it a default.
Second is that we extended the concept of Overhead Costs to Post Processors, and provided you with an easy way to edit them in the advanced quoting section, part of our new RFQ Responder (which is built in to Flows).
I was excited to see how many folks are interested in the RFQ Responder, which makes me hope that our future product launches aren’t bad ideas either 😉. As a reminder, we now have 4 Flows Spinouts:
Each of these has a section on our website – so head on over, it’s easier than ever to start to work with us!
Andre
FEBRUary 2023
TESTING 🧪
Excited to see some of you next month at AMUG, but before we get there we have a cool new feature to rave about and 2 pieces of news – one of which I wanted to give you a heads up on today.
First to the features, and to the continued results from our collaboration with TWI, ASTM, Photocentric and MPI under our Innovate UK grant: Material Test Panels . We’ve invested heavily in improving materials management as a way to improve the understanding of that material characteristics have on final part quality. What could be more important then to track material characteristics in as much granularity as possible? You’re right, nothing!
That’s what we thought too. Hence the decision to improve the way we track materials testing data. Previously, users who wanted to record a test simply did so by uploading a result pdf. Now you can define a variety of test data you want to capture independently so it’s easily to draw associations between that data over history and the final results the parts achieve in the machines. You can define a full material test panel, and detail each of the results you’d like to see. These can be templatized at the Material Type level.
Of course, the next stage is to give you the ability to draw those data points directly from the machine – we’ll be getting to that soon. If you have an interest in diving further into the materials management tool and understanding what other improvements are coming up, get in touch. Celina, the Materials Management Maestro (MMM™ 😉) is going to be at Rapid this year giving a talk, so that might also be a good chance to connect.
You may also want to ask either of us about the new release that will be announced in a couple of weeks: Our standalone Application Quoting tool. This combines the countless features we developed for our Flows workflow management engine and makes them available to people who just want to use these features. With it, quotes for additive applications that require engineering knowledge to complete will be faster and more collaborative, leading to more accurate quotes and more wins thanks to speed. Don’t get me wrong: We’re NOT planning on diving deep into some online quote tool where customers can upload their own designs. This is meant for serious service bureaus working on cutting edge application that want to make the process more efficient. Find out more information about our new Application Quoting tool here but please keep it between us as the news won’t break until the second week of March.
Or you could ask me more about it at AMUG. I’ll be there (with our awesome Goldberg machine, which caused quite a stir at Formnext, and the designs which we’ve now shared here ). We have a booth (no 46, Salon D) and several events going on:
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I am moderating the panel “Use of Data in Additive Manufacturing Operations” (March 21st, 3-4PM)
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I am on the panel “MES vs Excel or Whiteboard: A Comparison” (March 23rd, 10:30AM-12PM)
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Derek is on the workshop “An Introduction to Basic Measurement and Metrology for Additive Manufacturers” (1:30PM-2:30PM), then on the workshop “Scanning and Metrology” (3-4PM), as well as the panel "Measurement, Metrology and 3D Scanning for Additive Manufacturing" (4:30-5:30PM), all on March 20th
Hope to see you there! If you want to make sure that we find a time to meet in Chicago, you can do so here.
Andre
January 2023
Change 🔀
Greetings from Tenerife, where I’m spending the week escaping from the British winter and taking a breath (while still working) from an explosive first month. We’ve signed 3 new partners, had kick off with 2, are developing a new product, worked on 6 new grants alongside existing ones, and have some really exciting company developments coming up I can’t wait to tell you about.
But product development hasn’t stood still either. In fact, we just added another member to the customer success/product team to get our head around some of the gnarly product challenges. This month’s highlights are simpler by example, but no less impactful. They show how far the system has come in being able to provide the right information and enable the right changes, at the right time.
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Telling your colleagues who is currently operating a particular run is one example.
But product development hasn’t stood still either. In fact, we just added another member to the customer success/product team to get our head around some of the gnarly product challenges. This month’s highlights are simpler by example, but no less impactful. They show how far the system has come in being able to provide the right information and enable the right changes, at the right time.
And naturally, we gave folks a fourth option for non-conformance alongside new workflows, remanufacture, and sending to a NC desk. Now you can also fully scrap without triggering a remanufacture.
Goes to show that there is no end to the features needed to make a scalable workflow system “work” for real-world operations. It never ends. Keep your eyes peeled on 3DPrint.com, who will be releasing an article I wrote in the coming days in which I talk about why pursing this such digital workflows is important despite the effort involved.
Speaking of which, the 3DPrint.com folks invited me to share a stage in New York with other workflow companies in a couple weeks at Additive Manufacturing Strategies. If you’re in town, let me know. Otherwise, I’m sure I’ll see you at AMUG in March. To see where else you can catch up with Authentise folks, keep your eyes peeled on the Events page.
Look forward to seeing you soon!
Andre