November 2025
Thankful 🙏
I’ve made it through Thanksgiving and Formnext without getting (too) sick. If that isn’t something to be thankful for, I don’t know what is.
Honestly though – I always get sick at Formnext. I wonder what was different this year? It’s not that I was any less busy: I’m still not done following up with some of you and we had a major release unrelated to additive manufacturing (check out SPARC) during the same week. The team reported fewer but better conversations too.
Maybe we just know how to manage our energy better and stay focused on the important things. Just like our product and tech teams, who have managed to pull off a real banger: expanding our Material Management capabilities to include all Raw Materials and Consumables, beyond just additive materials.
Users can now assign and track these stocks within manufacturing Runs, ensuring they are correctly consumed and accounted for over time. This creates a complete Piece Bill of Materials on the Piece Traceability Page, offering unprecedented visibility into the material-level digital thread. With the ability to manage stock levels and trace consumption and replenishment, you can maintain clean, accurate inventory data for every part.
This change is the basis for a mega-step forward in how we manage inventory and tie it all the way through the Digital thread for an individual Part. It's the basis for our next generation of Assemblies along with Finished goods and more. Super exciting and it looks pretty slick too.
That’s on top of the work we did for SPARC, which is really the most amazing collaboration with other startups to help the DLA. Imagine: the US really has no way of accurately understanding how much spare capacity it has. It also has a pretty poor way of understanding capability. SPARC tries an entirely new approach: It ignores the outdated NAICS databases and takes understanding of capability/capacity from ground truth sources like MES and machine data.
It's a huge concept that we were going to show off at the Defense Manufacturing Conference in Orlando the week of Formnext. Maybe the shutdown-related rescheduling of that show (to March) and the resulting reprieve of having to be in 2 places at the same time is the reason I didn’t get sick. I’ve got one more show to go (AI for Defense in London on Wednesday) before the Authentise UK Xmas party on the 18th (in Manchester this time – goes to show how much things are changing at Authentise.
There’s much more to share. So many exciting projects. I came back from Formnext not only healthy but rearing to go. I kept on saying: We’re only at 1-2% of where the industry needs to be. Now’s the time to double down 🚀
If I don’t get to speak with you before: Happy Christmas!