October 2022

Hope you all saw the well-received Digital Design Warehouse release you were warned about last time? Since we started based on a vision of distributed manufacturing, it’s exciting to see that the concepts supporting both the discovery and distribution of designs are eliciting so much interest!

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But that’s just the start. Over the past 5 years of working on our workflow management tools, we’ve realized 2 things: one is that the process of ensuring a high-quality part is as important as coming up with the additive application, and the second is that everybody who works in the additive industry has a phenomenal amount of knowledge about the process.

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That’s now led to Guidelines, which will be publicly announced on Tuesday. Guidelines is a new feature developed under a UK grant, to encode knowledge and experience in a way that’s different from regimented workflows. It enables users to formulate if-this-then-that rules that use any type of engineering or production data as input. These rules then trigger suggestions at any point in the process. With Guidelines, a combination of machine sensor feedback, geometry features, or QA measurements, among others, can be used as triggers to suggest changes in behaviour or parameters that will ensure a more successful and sustainable production outcome. These suggestions are delivered to the user when required, during the engineering stages or in production.

Guidelines encapsulates so many of our core tenets that it’s hard to put into words. Not only does it do a great job at capturing tribal knowledge, but it also does so in a permissive way – no strictures, just suggestions. It’s also a fantastic way to start moving towards Transparent AI: Large parts of the manufacturing ecosystem reject many forms of Machine Learning because they make undecipherable changes to the process, which can’t be controlled for. Using Guidelines to provide the output of those algorithms as suggestions with an explanation is critical to increase AI acceptance. We’re already working on doing so – watch this space! 

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I’ve been an avid If-This-Then-That user for many years – outside manufacturing systems like Zapier, IFTTT or even Microsoft’s Power Automate, which Authentise is integrated with, make it much easier for even those with minimal experience with software to design their own rules and automations. It empowers people, and we built Guidelines because we believe it will do the same for those working in engineering and manufacturing.

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But of course, it’s not only those internal to companies that can create new rules. That’s why we’ve partnered with ASTM to start turning all those standards the community has been working on into rules that manufacturers can follow while still having the flexibility to tune their process. It’s really incredible how difficult the constantly shifting standards landscape is for folks: I had no idea it takes service providers weeks to work out a Request for Proposals package with nested standards referenced. We believe Guidelines can help with that problem as well as streamlining adherence and reducing the cost of certification in production.

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You can see Guidelines is a harder concept to communicate than the Digital Design Warehouse, but I hope that we’ve done an acceptable job in the press release. If not, meet us at one of the many events we’ll be at in the next few weeks (Develop3D Live and Advanced Engineering next week, as well as Formnext and Digital Manufacturing mid-November). If you’ll be there, find time to meet us. 

Until then!