September 2023

Rather unimaginatively, Happy August Bank Holiday, if you’re in the UK (and happy Labour day next week for you Americans!). Since I spent the last week taking care of some godchildren in our summer escape (Thorpeness, UK -dreamy 🥰) I definitely need a day. Our teams in the UK and the US have deserved the day off too – for more productive reasons. Flows , our main manufacturing process management tool, took a significant step forward in accomplishing our end-to-end vision. 

This month, the team released the first version of our environmental sensor integration. This is the first time we’ve added anything other than machine data and adds yet another dimension to the data that we track – alongside design/engineering operations, shopfloor operations and material data. In fact, it’s material genealogy data that we’re augmenting with this feature. In addition to being able to trace all the actions (such as blending, testing (with our new test panel), scraping, sieving, and printing material), we can now store the material in sub-locations (as mentioned in May), and associate environmental data to each of these sub-locations.

For now, we’re using sensors from a company called Pathfinder, which measure humidity, temperature, among others. Flows users are finding that the association of material storage conditions to material batches allows them to trace root cause more easily and study the impact of environmental conditions on material degradation. We’ll be adding additional sensor sources as we go on. Which ones would you like to see? 

We added other, more incremental but no less impactful, changes to other systems too. For instance, to the Digital Design Warehouse. That now has a carrousel option, which gives users the ability to add additional images to the existing render of the 3D design. This helps inspire other users to explore additive opportunities, and gives them ta better idea of what a part will look like before ordering. 

Now that this is out of the way, and the godchildren have left the building, I should be able to find some time to take August Bank Holiday seriously.Wish me luck for a break in the clouds – and enjoy the last official day of summer and, before then, your time at Formnext, Austin, if you’re there!