November 2024

I’ve finally regained my composure after a busy week in Frankfurt with over 40 meetings. Still haven’t gotten through my 25 follow ups though, partially because I’ve been eating non-stop for the last 2 days and have more planned today, after I share my impressions from Formnext, our banging ThreadsDoc release and Material Management updates. 

Formnext

A lot has already been written about the empty booths at the show, the rise of the Chinese at the show (along with the separate but no less interesting announcement of BLT providing parts for Airbus), and the disgrace of VoxelDance, who had their booth closed own by German customs officials. 

Those were some interesting facets, but based on what we saw I think they cover up the much more boring but clear reality: While there are a lot of companies in the sector suffering right now, the consistent story is one of pragmatic growth. The companies that are suffering may have mis-sold their investors on a hockey stick growth curve. Industrial markets don’t work like that. Adoption is slow and consistent. The conversations we had at Formnext with serious adopters showed that. It’s good that the industry is more realistic. We were on the whole very enthusiastic coming out of the show. 

ThreadsDoc (and ThreadsAPI)

Part of that is possibly because of all the great conversations we had about Threads, and in particular about its latest feature that you may have seen in the news in the runup to Formnext: ThreadsDoc automates the creation of templated documents, such as Technical Data Packages (TDPs), using data already captured within the Threads such as comments, annotations, and uploaded documents. It saves significant time—Boeing, for example, reduced TDP drafting time by 100–150 hours per package and cleared a backlog of over 100 parts. TDPs aren’t the only types of documents you can create – the templates can be freely configured – users have generated onboarding templates, milestone and quality reports, for example. It’s a big step in our drive to eliminate redundant work and errors from the engineering process, and reduce the time it take to turn an idea to a part. Long term, ThreadsDoc is part of our journey to turn intent right into designs! 

At the same time we also released ThreadsAPI, which is (almost) as exciting as ThreadsDoc. In short, we realized after the release of the integration with Plyable that many users were interested in developing their own integrations into Threads. Students, for example, who want to run simple scripts on newly uploaded designs. Well, that’s now possible. Check it out here.

Crazy how many conversations turned around to Threads. While Flows and Materials Management (see below) are still grabbing a majority of the attention, it’s clear that Threads meets an important need. The idea-to-design space is really underserved!! 

Materials Management

You’ve going to be hearing a lot about Materials Management, as we’ve signed a big deal to enhance features even further. Crazy to think there’s more potential to detail the materials flow from an already commanding lead in the industry. You can get a feel for the changes from the improvements we released this month: 

• We now generate a new, unique batch id for the result of a topoff. 

• We have also added the ability to print your container QR codes directly from our QR app.

So many features – both on existing and new tools. I wonder whether the dev team can keep it up, but with everything that’s on our plate I think they’re going to have to!! We’re reshuffling the team slightly and realizing how much talent is currently on the hunt for something else – so I expect that we will have a turbocharged Q1. Even more exciting news to look forward to. That’s one thing I’m intensely grateful for – the amazing users that keep pushing us for more and better, and the incredible team that makes it happen!! 

Hope the Americans among you are slowly awaking from your food coma.

Be in touch!