3DPRINTUK
"This is where all the good stuff happens,” is not the introduction you might expect when stepping into the sorting space of a company that manufactures, polishes and dyes thousands of parts a day.
We’ve walked around more than half a dozen 3D printing systems and are about to walk by several part-finishing machines before heading upwards to see where the next machine instalments will live, but none of that stirs 3DPRINTUK CEO Nick Allen quite as much as this modest room equipped with a few monitors and trays.
Allen designed the entire building, but it’s the sorting room – not the 11 EOS P110, three P 396 or three HP Multi Jet Fusion systems – that we keep coming back to during this tour. The system that powers the company’s sorting was built in-house from the ground up some seven years ago, replacing another system also developed by the 3DPRINTUK team.
“And it’s never finished,” Allen says. “We launched [the current order management system] in 2019, and then we transitioned. So, we had a previous system which we had done ourselves as well, which was quite good, but it was nothing compared to this. We haven’t looked back.”
We step into the 3DPRINTUK offices on a gloriously sunny day in North London, the kind of afternoon where the company is getting its money’s worth out of the temperature and humidity control technology in its manufacturing facility on the ground floor. In mid-August, 3DPRINTUK is slightly less busy than it is outside of holiday season, but there are still employees rushing around us as we meander through the facility from sort room to 3D printers to dye stations and back to sort room. A focus on ‘batch production’ with ‘unit cost down and quantity up’ has meant 3DPRINTUK has always been wedded to powder bed fusion technology, with EOS and HP being the brands that the company is relying on.
Working with these technologies, 3DPRINTUK has been successful in churning out thousands of parts a day for a whole host of companies. Operating as an e-commerce company, 3DPRINTUK is only likely to hear from its customers in worstcase scenarios. For a service bureau, that means parts not being delivered on time.
Since onboarding the new management order system, 3DPRINTUK has reduced these instances by around 90%. Hence, Allen feels assured in his praise for the system.
The system covers everything from ‘quoting to accounting to pipelines to postproduction’ and is facilitating the sorting of between 3,500 and 5,000 parts a day. Each part is sorted after the build, sorted after secondary or tertiary finishing, and then sorted again for shipping. It can add up to 15,000 sorts a day.
Crucially, 3DPRINTUK is tracking parts not orders, with the tracking orders deemed inefficient by the company. As parts move through the additive manufacturing workflow, operators are faced with a wall of thumbnails depicting components currently moving through the facility. Here, they can input the number of parts that have been sorted, and the number of parts that are still to be sorted, as well as any issues that have occurred along the way, such as print defects during the build or parts damaged in the polisher. This keeps a log of where parts are up to in the workflow before a colour-coded system informs users which parts need what finish. At the final stage, parts have to be scanned before being packaged, and the system won’t let staff print labels if parts have been misplaced.
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The order management system not only guides parts through the workflow, but it also provides extensive tracking. 3DPRINTUK retrieves data from all of its printing and post-processing hardware, helping to monitor machines, inform operators of the regularity of any issues and provide ratings against the most well-performing systems. Operators also have access to graphs and reports which assess the progress being made in relation to the order queue, as well as informing the user of what actions have been taken once issues have been raised. Monitoring is also done across stock, KPIs, lead times, supply chain, distribution and quality management.
3DPRINTUK’s quality management capabilities in particular were described as the ‘one of the best’ its auditor had ever seen as the company achieved ISO 9001:2015 late last year. All orders are now processed against this standard.
As 3DPRINTUK has established itself as one of the UK’s leading additive manufacturing service bureaus, its order management system has also helped to address many of the challenges service providers come up against, whether it be the repeatability of 3D printing technology or the reliable delivery of parts.
“We have made what we believe is the most efficient system in the world for what we do,” Allen says, “because we couldn’t find anything off the shelf that would work for us in any degree of accuracy or speed.”
3DPRINTUK
