Away from the hustle and bustle, in one of the few quiet spots to be found at Formnext 2019, a table for three sits in no-man’s land between one collection of exhibitors and another.
It provides the setting for some frank assessments of the 3D printing industry and some bold evaluations of Link3D’s growing role within it. Scratching some comments off the record, co-founder and CEO Shane Fox jokes, “You should hear me when I’m talking to somebody who’s not going to write things about me.”
You should also hear him when he is.
Fox sits alongside his fellow founder, CTO Vishal Singh, to discuss the company’s latest product releases and partnership announcements, introduced and agreed to help establish 3D printing as a manufacturing tool in the minds of industry’s largest players. The company was founded in 2016 and has since rolled out a host of products as part of a modular portfolio, among which is its Manufacturing Execution System (MES), designed specifically for additive manufacturing. This platform allows users to manage their assets, from machines and materials to people and databases, in a single dashboard to plan their production workflow and run simulations to predict certain outcomes within their supply chain.
“Traditionally, the industry has been very closed off,” Fox says. “You have a machine maker who has their own workflow software, their own materials, their own process and it’s not scalable; it creates tribal knowledge. If I use Insight or GrabCAD Stratasys, I’m an expert in that and that’s what I know. We come in as an agnostic play where we handle the workflows around the machines and we have partnerships to integrate into the build prep software like Netfabb, so we don’t replace their software, but we partner to enable that workflow and machine connectivity.”
Machine connectivity is a pair of (buzz)words uttered a lot by Fox and his colleagues when in conversation with manufacturers, usually followed by a host of questions, ‘what does that mean? Why do you want machine connectivity? Which data, exactly, do you want?’ Typically, the answers that come back are about using data from the machine to automate build and quality reports. Rather than having to manually fill out these reports, the view of Link3D and its clients is automating this process would save time and reduce the risk of error. These manufacturers also want to understand more about potential machine downtime and build failures, monitoring their fleets of machines to understand when a build may fail or when deviations in the parts might occur.
Link3D
Link 3D
The Link3D stand at Formnext 2019.
Link3D’s customers, Fox points out, are brands you’re likely to find in Fortune 500 listings, those who invest big, have the potential to scale big and want to integrate additive manufacturing into their existing supply chains. These are the companies with the capacity to apply 3D printing for end-use applications at high volumes but, Fox considers, still aren't fully understood by the equipment vendors in the additive space.
“You need this machine connectivity to optimise the supply chain. If the machine goes down, the system can automatically route an order to a different machine and start the print at a different location,” Fox explains. “The [additive] machine makers, they make great technology, they make great manufacturing equipment, but they don’t provide the operational efficiency and operational site tools that people need. As an industry, we need to learn more about manufacturing and not just be a technology industry. It’s still like that. We need to really understand supply chain, throughput, operational optimisation because these things are important to sell machines.
“Additive was made, designed and built on prototyping. It didn’t have to be integrated into a traditional manufacturing supply chain. It didn’t need specific monitoring and sensor technology that injection moulding or CNC may have. It didn’t need specific optimisation workflows around it, because it wasn’t about speed to market in the commercial sense.
“Now, it is and with the new generations of machine and technologies coming out, I believe we’ll get there. But I don’t think enough players have spent enough time on a true production floor to really understand all of the tools that go into that ecosystem that enable that.”
Gradually, as more 3D printing systems are deployed to produce more end-use parts, Fox can see some progress. But it’s the rate of this progress that provides much of the motivation for the products it continues to roll out and the partnerships it continues to seek. Amidst all that is a policy of employing people with experience and expertise of and with traditional manufacturing techniques to supplement the additive know-how in the business, and bring to market software tools that can enable manufacturers to deploy the two side by side without too much disruption.
That, in addition to rallying cries delivered through the audio recording device resting on the table, represents Link3D’s contribution to the effort. The MES can automatically generate data books to allow work order statuses, bill of materials, data sheets and quality documents to be logged or accessed in real-time, while also tracking parts, sub-assemblies and final assemblies to ensure quality downstream. Its Centralized Order Entry tool allows users to configure order forms to capture data for business analytics; streamlines costing and quoting with nesting simulations, formula and volume-based pricing; and facilitates the printability verification of build files. The Production Planning System provides the capabilities to batch multiple geometries; schedule jobs based on delivery dates and production parameters; and gain visibility of the entire shop floor. Meanwhile, the Data Analytics Reporting System enables users to access native reports to better understand demand and the utilisation rates of machine and materials; build data analytics dashboards for continuous improvement; and work to reduce design and production cycle times with real-time data analytics.
We want people to think manufacturing, stop thinking technology.
Then, there’s the Quality Management System; the latest module to be launched by Link3D, which has been designed to assist manufacturers in ensuring quality assurance and certification for regulatory compliance. Users can investigate root causes for identified risks; put plans in place to stop them occurring and reoccurring; and configure workflows to ensure repeatability as scale increases. Fox describes it as a ‘cultural product’ that aims to change the way manufacturers go about making parts. The benefits are said to be improved communication and collaboration, with a feedback loop between engineers helping to eliminate defects.
“The post-processing engineer can talk to the designer and say ‘you should design it like this’, and the designer can say ‘you can post-process like this’, leading to the whole organisation being able to deliver parts faster at a higher quality and track if there are any problems and why they are happening,” CTO Singh explains. “Recalls are happening, adverse events are happening in the real world: why is it happening and where is the data? Meeting with compliance, ISO audits, NASA certifications, there was a need in the market, particularly for companies scaling with additive, and that need was unmet.”
“If you start repeating more parts, you might buy more machines because you find more use cases,” Fox adds. “The [additive manufacturing] industry is very honed in on the machines and the materials, and if you go to another manufacturing trade show, machines are standard. It’s a commodity on price. It’s everything around it that is provided in efficiencies. At the end of the day, our goal is to enable material providers to start selling more materials and machine providers to start selling more machines.”
Link3D
Link3D CTO Vishal Singh gives a demo at Formnext.
Link3D CTO Vishal Singh gives a demo at Formnext.
Fox offers this insight in the context of the potential for consolidation within the additive manufacturing space, with such a prospect influencing who Link3D partners up with. Being ‘choosy’ and selecting ‘what we believe to be the winners’, Link3D has been working with EOS for 18 months, initially through a proof of concept trial in North America and now to track benchmark requests, scheduled jobs and post-production quality data in real-time in the US and Germany. Its MES software has been integrated with EOSCONNECT to allow entire workflows to be visualised, while build analysis to root out failures will also be a key feature of the collaboration. Working with EOS, Fox says, has been ‘extremely fruitful’ for Link3D so far.
“They’re the real deal. They have machines that work; they have parts in space, parts in cars, parts in the human body. The fact we’re powering all of their benchmarking and printing sites is remarkable for us personally, but it also brings a lot of benefit because we have a continuous feedback loop with EOS,” Fox says. “We need real production environments using our system and they’ve given us an insane amount of feedback. They’ve helped us simplify and automate their DMLS and SLS workflows, so a user using our system has a very simple path from design to print in our software. It’s going to help customers build parts smarter and faster and more economically. We don’t partner with anyone unless it helps the customer. That’s been our objective and it’s starting to really pay off for us as a company.”
An extension of this alliance sees PTC add its augmented reality Vuforia software to ‘govern’ workforce training, while also integrating with Link3D’s MES to help with the digital ordering, costing, build scheduling and machine and downstream processes within customer workflows. At this point, Fox emphasises the progress being made within the link-up with EOS, while pointing out the same can’t be said of every collaboration that’s been announced in the 3D printing space.
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The company has also begun working with Autodesk, connecting its MES bidirectionally with the Fusion 360 and Netfabb software platforms to allow users to harness digital threads, while also streamlining ordering, build data preparation and job scheduling.
“That’s a big one, so good,” Fox says.
“[This partnership] is huge,” Singh adds, “because never before two different companies have integrated a build prep and an MES workflow software [where there is] full, bidirectional, deep integration.”
“You can figure the entire platform to fit your environment, so if you’re aero, auto, medical, you have the freedom to configure and make a product that is custom,” Fox continues. “In additive, we talk about customisation products, but no one focuses on the people buying the machines and the [systems] that they have been forced to using. Our system allows you to configure it, build it the way you want it, and use it the way you need to use it with our help.”
Enabling Link3D to offer this help internationally is a $7 million venture capital funding round led by AI Capital, which the software vendor plans to harness to drive its growth into Asia and Europe, while also exploring ways in which machine learning can improve workloads and help maintain the cost-effectiveness of deploying 3D printing. Link3D also promises the introduction of more modules, as well as machine partnerships, with the roadmap driven by the most prevalent challenges its customers face.
Link3D
Link3D
Link3D at Formnext 2019.
Fox and Singh highlight the importance of continued innovation, with talk of planting their flag in the ground and claiming the additive MES space as their own, while wary that if Link3D doesn’t execute its mission properly, another company might. The pair liken what Link3D does to the operating system on a smartphone: the hardware has the user's trust because the operating system, be it Android or iOS, makes it user friendly.
Despite the techy analogy, Fox and Singh want the additive space to move beyond the technology and are laser-focused on getting 3D printing seamlessly integrated into the supply chains of the biggest manufacturers in the world. As they stand up and slide their chairs back beneath the table, they know they’ll need support from many of the exhibitors spread out around them.
“We want people [in the additive manufacturing industry] to be more manufacturing-minded and we want people to think manufacturing, stop thinking technology,” Fox concludes. “Yes, the technology is great and it’s cool, but at the end of the day we have to, everyone has to, come together to figure out how to integrate it into the traditional supply chain.
“We have to come together for the process repeatability, we need to come together on unified standards for the industry, whether it be workflow, hardware, software, materials, whatever the case is, we have to come together on that. And we have to cut out the fluff, be transparent, and work on the problems that are seen through [that] transparency and move this to the next stage so it keeps growing.”
On Monday April 27th through Tuesday April 28th, Link3D, in partnership with RAPID + TCT, AeroDef and 3D Natives, will be hosting the Digital Additive Manufacturing Marathon, a 26.2-hour-long virtual conference. For more information click here.
