July 2020
Re-scheduling
I seem to have skipped last month, which is unlike me – normally Cosimo gives me 1000 reminders. Maybe the continued COVID distractions (I hope everybody is safe) caused the blip. Another reason might be that we’re in the middle of a major initiative around scheduling: Scheduling for additive is a fiendishly challenging subject and in the first half of the year we developed a long list of things that we wanted to improve, despite the fact that there’s already a comprehensive set of features that automatically organized production plans. The new list includes steps such as scheduling whole builds, allowing workflows to “join” together, allowing specimen “splits” to happen at any point of the workflow and more. Having tried our best to both define and validate the tasks as much as possible we finally got going and have delivered:
Ability to schedule to specific workstations instead of groups of workstations
Ability to switch between different workstations
Allowing workflow changes mid-production.
This last item is a critical element for more intelligent rework options: To date, we’ve only captured fail cause and errored the item out if rework was selected. Now, the user will also have the option of re-defining the remaining workflow with new workflow steps and instructions.
This presents an additional challenge since operators are allowed to make workflow changes in some organizations and not others. So I suspect that this change will eventually cause us to have to implement a long-held plan of improving the permissions system beyond controlling simply who can see what, to providing the option of defining what actions are allowed to be completed by whom even if they can see it.
Still lots to go on scheduling. Those stories above represent only 3 of 13 stories we’ve identified. We’d love to hear from you if you have any input into your biggest peeves around scheduling. We’ve spoken to many of you already, but if you have the time for a review of the stories we are planning to help prioritize and ensure our list is comprehensive and that we’re implementing the stories right, please reach out.
Despite our focus on scheduling, we’re getting other things done too. One is speed (one of our pages is 5x faster now!), and we’ve finally integrated the mesh healing module so that parts that are detected as not being watertight can be healed in the MES
In fact, because we’re following guidance from customers quite strictly there are still a number of modules that aren’t integrated into the MES yet. You can see a full list of modules here. My biggest regret is that we have yet to persuade any MES users to take geometric search seriously – such a powerful feature. I hope it will gain more traction as the database of parts grows.
More on scheduling next month! Till then – enjoy the summer if you can!