AMUG
A weekend arrival, a glance at the agenda, a brief exchange with friends met at previous events and then a beeline for the earliest networking activity.
The AMUG Conference is a highlight on many an additive manufacturing (AM) user's calendar. It returns in April, with a conference program featuring a host of the organisation’s sponsors, as well as keynote talks from Ford’s Ellen Lee and Divergent’s Kevin Czinger, and an interview with Andy Christensen.
Before that, AMUG kicks off with some ASTM- and SME-hosted training and certification sessions, while DMG Mori opens the doors of its local facility to attendees. There is also the AMUG Expo, in which – in the evening at least – you might be encouraged to roam with something cold and fizzy in your hand as you take in the latest AM tech.
“The expo is a supporting element of the learning,” AMUG President Carl Dekker tells TCT. “You’ve got additive, but then you also have a lot of stuff to enable additive, and a lot that additive enables. And once you get those ideas, you now have a week to go around and talk with people and find out is this really the truth? Does this really work the way I’m expecting it to?”
The learning that Dekker speaks of is the extensive conference program that makes up the bulk of the week’s agenda. On each weekday, there are sponsor and training lab sessions hosted by the likes of EOS, GE Additive, Stratasys and HP – all of whom are Diamond Sponsors. From Tuesday through Thursday, each morning also has a showpiece feature. Tuesday sees Czinger detail Divergent 3D’s application of 3D printing, with Lee giving her keynote presentation on the Thursday. In between, Christensen will take part in a fireside chat.
“We’re looking to have good stories that give examples of how we’re seeing additive get engaged in more areas,” Dekker says. “There’s a lot of potential areas of implementation that our keynotes have done in their automotive companies and it’s helping show that AM doesn’t have to be the end part to [make] manufacturing more efficient, more cost-effective and higher quality.
“[Meanwhile,] Andy has done an amazing job. He saw opportunities to really implement efficiencies in healthcare and use medical modelling as a catalyst to make those come to reality and opened up a huge area of growth for additive, blazing some of the trail with it.”
Dekker has been working with AMUG for several years, first as Vice President and then as President since 2019. But he has been an attendee for much longer. As such, he has been a beneficiary of the networking opportunities afforded to AMUG attendees that he now advocates for as President. Across the AMUG week, there is plenty of time set aside for attendees to rub shoulders, including at the expo, in the hotel bars and at offsite events. There are also networking lunches, in which attendees are allocated a table at random. This, Dekker says, is designed to pull people out of their usual social groups and facilitate new connections.
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“By having people separated, you’re now able to wind up at a table where you could have ten new people that you’ve never met before and have a perfectly valid reason to open a continued conversation that [could] help you throughout the year,” Dekker says. “We’re all professionals doing AM, we all have a lot of the same issues, [but] you may never have met these people had it not been for a nudged introduction.”
The idea is that by bringing AM users together to share insights and ideas at an all-inclusive event, the industry resembles something of a logarithmic spiral. In the very early days, a lot of the conversation at AMUG might have revolved around the mere concept of taking an object from the digital CAD space to the physical space overnight. But in 2022, as Christensen, Lee and Czinger will detail, it has grown to be about real-world impacts from real-world applications.
“We’re still learning where exactly we can apply all this,” Dekker says. “And sometimes it just takes a conversation with the right people that you met at one of the networking activities. You say, ‘hey you mentioned this, but what about this?’ and we start seeing more applications come out that they can present in future years. It becomes a breeding ground of ideas.”
