April 2020
Announcing Material Genealogy
What an exciting month! Not only are we trying to cope with COVID and having kids at home, but we’re also being productive at work. I hope you’re healthy and that you’re not letting the onslaught get to you. Our team just got a box of coffee/tea box (not British tea, much to my dismay) to help get them through this mess, and started asking others how they’re coping on our new weekly video series. Check it out on Youtube or just subscribe to our LinkedIn. While you’re at it, check out our new website too!
The coffee seems to have helped because a core new feature I’ve been teasing for a while has gone into beta (drumroll please XX): Material Genealogy Management. This feature is a critical extension to our inventory management tools, especially where metal powders are concerned. This feature is used in both the main website and the mobile app. Let me explain.
In the main site, the user can now create a new material batch and print related QR codes for both machines and materials.
In the mobile app, they will scan the material they want to manage and can take a range of actions such as loading it into a machine, test, sieve, blend and more.
This action, along with all other actions are logged and are accessible in a traceability report of each material, which is attached to the part report.
The material history is also visible as a genealogy tree in the main site, with several features including the ability to view all or none of the actions, or see the tree beginning with the material, or ending with it.
For serious production centres, material genealogy plays an incredibly important role – and one that is still very poorly understood. This tool will help our users understand what happened to a material, and associate it to any resulting part performance issues. Armed with that knowledge, managers will be able to decide once and for all whether they can reduce the amount of virgin material, how many reuses are possible and more. That increases part quality while reducing cost. Frankly, it is astonishing to me that we don’t have this knowledge yet, but I’m incredibly proud of our team for resolving that issue now, once and for all.
Of course, other issues were solved too, and more features created – but I’ll tell you about them next time.
Till then, stay safe!