April 2023

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:

1. 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. 

2. 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.

3. 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!