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October 2020

Steps

As the World slides back into COVID chaos, we’re still taking steps forward. In particular, our major feature release this month – created in record time: The ability to outsource a specific step to a service provider, rather than just the whole part. This is an obvious use case for all those customers that have production capability in house but lack some testing or post-processing capability. 


Now customers in that position can:

  • Identify which suppliers are able to complete specific of the workflow (and get them to confirm). 

  • Define workflows that have a single, or multiple, steps identified that need external processing. We do this by using the “workstation” feature. This is normally used to allow users to define a specific workstation, but in this case also allows users to select that this specific step will be outsourced. If selected, shipment processes are automatically associated.

  • Associate a workflow with outsourced steps to a line item.

  • Request quotes from a list of approved vendors for that line item. Only those suppliers approved for that process type are displayed. 

  • Those users already using the supplier management feature to outsource whole parts (which you can still use), will be familiar with the rest of the process: Requesting bids, approving the bids, and monitoring the production process.

Get more detail on this help page. It is exciting to see that the platform and the team has now reached a maturity level that allows us to release even major updates relatively easily. This one just took a couple weeks and it wasn’t like we threw everything we had at it either. We had lots of small and large tickets going on at the same time. Notably, we added a few more printers to our Echo data listener:

  • We were lucky to be beta testers of Stratasys’s new API. This has given us more access to Stratasys device data than ever before (and stops us going in the back door 😉)

  • EOS was kind enough to give us access to Connect documentation, but they wanted $$$ for support in integrating with their new API so we decided to go it alone. In general, machine vendors seem a little confused about data, how to monetize it and work with their customers. We don’t mind people making money, but we help sell more machines by reducing total cost of ownership, so I expected a little more support. At this point it just feels like big guys throwing their weight around


As always - a lot more printer integrations coming, as are more talks: I’ve just given one at the SMX event organized my SME & AMT, together with Runze from ExLattice and SK from Addiguru, on how modules (and their integration in MES) play an incredibly important part in creating a dynamic production system.


I’ve got other talks coming up too:

 

For those American friends of ours, there’s really only one event that counts: Nov 3. Have you already voted?

See you on the other side. 


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