April 2021

First things first: We’re at AMUG next week celebrating the launch of our partnership with Hexagon to create the first open, end-to-end workflow.

Those of you who don’t know Hexagon, it’s not surprising: Hexagon is the 20,000 person strong company that hides behind some of the most used tools in design, engineering, production and quality in additive and beyond. The own Leica metrology tools, simufact for metal additive simulation, Volume Graphics for the analysis of CT models and much, much more.

All these point solutions are incredibly powerful, but as stand-alone tools they are adding an additional burden on the user to upload and download designs into different software packages at different points in the process. This leads to lost time, version control issues, and more.

Previously, we were told that the only way to overcome these issues was to buy solutions from a single vendor. The challenge is that they don’t have integrated solutions either and they don’t like letting third parties fill the gaps they have – they try to lock customers in.

So the partnership with Hexagon is revolutionary: We’ve got some really exciting ideas about ways in which we can integrate tools to make additive production easier, more reliable and transparent. These include in-line simulation, automated fixture design, and more. We’re working these out with our customers at the moment, so if you’re interested in learning more and helping us figure out which of these integrations we should focus on, please get in touch with me or go to the partner website.

Materials

It’s not all been partnerships though. Our dev team has been super hard at work hardening our systems on all fronts. The most visible example is the work we’ve been doing on material inventory management to make it easier to receive materials and to re-order. Material types now have minimum stock levels, so re-orders are prompted either by email or via the integration with ERP systems.

Writing about these continuous improvements every month lets me reflect a little and it’s not without a tear or two: We’ve come so far with our partners. To be thinking about minimum stock levels is another example of how robust the system is becoming.Obviously there’s more: Location Contact Email Alerts, Order/Line Item Duplication duplicates all fields, Build Volume/Packing Override Option, Likely Completion Date is Smarter/more accurate, etc etc. It’s all too much to talk about here but I would be delighted to do so in person. Please do get in touch, I’d be delighted. I may not be at AMUG personally but our team will be and I’m never more than a quick call away.Looking forward to talk with you soon.