August 2022

Summer’s coming to its glorious finale with the traditional markers: Labor Day is just around the corner. All the more important for us to focus on making sure that collaboration between people working in facilities is streamlined. You’ll be reading a lot more about this as we ready our first non-additive releases but the theme is critical in our additive aMES product too.

Specifically, we’ve moved to allow conversations about parts throughout their lifecycle. Whereas before, conversations could only be had about line items in orders, that concept is now moved through to the production environment too inside the QR app, which we only just extended last month with the “kiosk mode”. This allows users on the shop floor to raise a question or the alarm about a specific part without having to go through a full Non-Conformance Report.

We’ve got some great feedback on this already and would love to extend the conversation element further – if you’re interested in “threaded” conversations or other innovations, please let us know. We’d love to get more guidance on what’s important.

Another form of collaboration is agreeing on what’s going to be done. That’s why we’re very proud to introduce “Certified Builds”. This is a massive step forward in production runs, which allows users to define a build layout so that it doesn’t have to be redefined every time a build is produced. Those Builds are now available in the Library section, which previously only included models.

Again: We’d love to hear your feedback. At the moment, the library is limited to production runs but there are other concepts we’d love to explore such as provisional runs (where a draft of the run is created prior to order confirmation) and a templated run (which includes a build layout but parts with small variations (such as serial numbers, or light customization are added as production move along).

Of course, no collaboration happens if communication isn’t fluent so we also worked on speed this month. All our users noticed big improvements, and while we’re still quantifying the changes, we know they’re in the order of magnitude category. And we’re not done yet. There’s been a lot going on behind the scenes to modernize both our frontend and backend stack, so we have a much better basis for future changes.

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This email makes our process and collaboration sound really smooth. How else could we deliver such amazing features and improvements? But I can guarantee you: it’s not plain sailing ⛵ - so the long weekends coming up in the UK and the US are sorely welcomed for a bit of relaxation. Hope you get some rest too. And once you’re done, I hope to see you at IMTS. I’m there for a couple of days, so if you are too, please ping me!

Until then!