June 2022
Orientation 🧭
The summer is bursting in on us but we’re not ditching the office for the beach just yet. There’s a lot to do and promises to keep.
Among them is the long-awaited orientation feature addition. This allows users to set the orientation of a part during the review of the part and lock each axis in place manually for further processing. This includes the ability to determine orientation during the nesting process.
This is a huge change for us as it enables customers processing relatively simple parts to manually manage the process of preparing the file entirely inside Authentise. Orientation was one of the few areas in which we didn’t have a manual workaround to changing the setting in the app. This meant that users that didn’t trust our algorithms had to download the part, change the orientation and reupload. That’s cumbersome and although we would of course prefer people to trust our smarts, manual options are the baseline for process management tools such as Authentise so I’m delighted that we finally rectified this gap.
There are other changes that will be noticed by some of our hardened users, including an updated to our Shipment Packaging Slip. It offers enhanced capability including a QR code for accessing the virtual Packing Slip and editable Ship-To, Bill-To, and Ship-From addresses.
These changes have been running in parallel to our frontend and backend technology refresh. These are major projects but won’t be immediately noticeable to most. However, they’re critical as they increase performance, future development speed and overall capabilities that we are able to offer.
The business side of the house has been similarly busy: You’ll have noticed lots of small changes to the website, webinars (there’s one coming up on July 14th to discuss The Future of Process Monitoring (our partnership/integration with nebumind), and many different use cases. This is all thanks to our first Chief Marketing Officer (Charlie, who joined us a couple months ago) and Andreea, also a fairly new recent addition to our team.
Talking of team members – one major piece of news is that Simon McCaldin is joining us from TWI on August 1st to take over the Open Innovation (read: Grants and strategic projects) side of the business. That’s going to scale alongside our main business (we’re aiming to keep grants at ~20% of the business going forward to enable us to continue to invest in the longer-term features that keep us and the industry moving. Having raised £30m+ grants directly, Simon is more than able to sustain that growth.
With that team I don’t expect the pace of change to slow down, even though we are heading into the summer and I, for one, would quite like to head to the beach.Happy 4th of July 🇺🇸 to those of you stateside. Us Brits will just calmly drink our tea and carry on.