3D Systems
The opening of a Customer Innovation Centre. The launch of two metal 3D printing platforms. The delivery of four large-format stereolithography systems.
These are all the subjects of press announcements distributed by 3D Systems in November 2018, announced around Formnext, just a few days after filling a ‘key leadership role’ affecting ‘the core of the company's strategy’.
It was an appointment largely overlooked by the additive manufacturing trade media; perhaps because the collective focus was instead turned to the machine launches and material releases at the industry’s biggest trade fair, and perhaps because the aims and objectives laid out would make for a better story once the company was on its way to achieving them.
Twelve months on, the trade media was back in Frankfurt, and so was Radhika Krishnan, a year into her role as Executive Vice President, Software, Healthcare, and Digitization, giving TCT an update on the progress made.
Immediately, Krishnan had recognised 3D Systems was offering a portfolio of ‘very good but siloed’ software products. Five months in, she inherited responsibility for the company’s healthcare business and with it two facilities in Leuven, Belgium and Denver, Colorado. In between, she identified additive inspection capabilities as a particular limitation in the market and so work has commenced there. And throughout, to tie together those siloed software products, a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) platform has been under development ahead of its launch, which is pencilled in for this year.
This MES platform is called JobXpert and seems every bit something that would be considered core to a company's strategy. It is set to allow 3D Systems customers to automate their workflows end to end, track goods and monitor data flows throughout, and ultimately optimise additive production processes.
Radhika Krishnan 3D systems
“Customers really want to be able to drive into workflows,” Krishnan explained, “especially if you think about where we are as a company and this journey that additive is on, where we’re migrating from prototyping to production. The epiphany for us, in order to affect that gradual transition, it’s going to be a set of hybrid workflows. We’re going to have some printing at the front end, post-processing that will happen [at the back end] and you need to have a way of blending the two and the only way to do that is software. The vision that we’re driving is end to end workflows.”
3D Systems believes this MES product will help to enhance the adoption of its additive manufacturing platforms. Currently, users of 3D Systems’ printing technology have access to a full range of software products, be it the vendor's scanning and design tools under the Geomagic brand, 3D Sprint and 3DXpert for design and build preparation or the inspection capabilities of Control X, but they can’t access a platform from 3D Systems that stitches these processes together. 3D Connect affords users the ability to implement real-time remote diagnostics, but this is 'more of an IoT platform.' There’s potential for 3D Connect and JobXpert to be consolidated into one platform in the future, while the MES software will also allow users to integrate software tools from other vendors into their workflows too.
“The intent is to provide latitude,” Krishnan said. “We’re not expecting that customers would want to buy every single one of our software products, so we want to give them the liberty to go do what they want to do.”
Something 3D Systems would expect of its customers is to be impressed by the deployment of JobXpert inside its Leuven and Denver healthcare facilities. At one site, 3D Systems is manufacturing patient-specific parts like aligners, surgical guides and anatomical models, while the other focuses on stock parts. Both of these locations have access to the full suite of 3D Systems’ software products and it was considered essential to deploy the JobXpert platform as soon as it was ready.
Krishnan believes the MES software’s application in Belgium and the U.S. has helped the company to understand the logistics of implementing this kind of infrastructure inside a fully operational business, and one that also required two slightly different workflows for the patient-specific and stock part production lines, respectively.
“As we look to evolve software and its role within the company, healthcare has proven to be very, very good for figuring out how we automate our workflows end to end. Think of it as the canary in the coal mine, eating our own dog food. It’s been an absolute blessing,” Krishnan said. “We’ve tried to create those workflows so we can produce the parts with high quality in a quicker turnaround, better traceability and so on. We can also offer that same set of capabilities to our end customers and we’re seeing the industry evolving where we have point of care customers that want to do this in-house, put a printer in their basement and print stuff, and we’re trying to enable those kind of use cases.”
The implementation of JobXpert inside the Leuven and Denver facilities hasn’t just been actioned because it was a call Krishnan could make as the person in charge of both software and medical, but also because the company considers it to be one of the most challenging vertical markets such are the regulatory constraints. Krishnan also pointed out that the Leuven facility manufactures parts for the aerospace industry too, while the company is regularly hosting customers in Denver to take a look at its production operations.
'Everything that we produce and hand to our users is basically revenue for them. The quicker we turnaround, the better.'
When Krishnan first started at 3D Systems, among her first tasks was to meet with many of 3D Systems’ leading customers, plenty of which are in the Fortune 50. She would ask what they wanted 3D Systems to offer them, what’s working well and what isn’t working so well. Their answers were harnessed as the motivation to develop JobXpert.
“Much higher quality, much quicker lead time and much better traceability,” Krishnan listed. “They want to have that ability to track things down and pinpoint it down to a process and this JobXpert platform essentially enables all three of those. Everything that we produce and hand to them, that’s basically revenue for them. And so, the quicker we turnaround, the better it is.”
Something else to come from conversations with customers is a desire for additive inspection capabilities. From trekking the show floor at Control in Stuttgart last year, Krishnan has come to the conclusion that additive inspection is lacking. “If you look at the overlap between traditional inspection vendors and additive vendors, the intersection is not very strong. You walk around Control and there’s all these cool kinds of inspection capabilities that exist out there, but I think inspection vendors don’t really get additive.”
Krishnan believes 3D Systems is well-equipped, as ‘one of the few who understand both’, to address this gap in the market. The company already provides the Geomagic Control X software platform, which allows users to process and interpret scan data to assess the manufacturability of designs, identify defects or assembly issues, and predict future failures by modifying the part’s geometry overtime in a virtual workspace, but has recently added a host of updates.
3D Systems introduced the 2020 version of the platform at Formnext, featuring 20 new geometry probing methods and an updated probe point management system, as well as the Inspection Viewer which allows contributors throughout an organisation to create, modify and share inspection reports. There are also annotation tools, the ability to import 3D Sprint build files directly into the platform, the means to accurately identify the root cause of manufacturing errors with per-axis inspection and automation capabilities.
These enhancements, Krishnan believes, puts the capability of its Control X software on a par with its 3D printing design tools.
“We’ve got robust additive printing products in 3DXpert and 3D Sprint, and we’ve got a robust inspection product,” she said. “Now, we’re basically looking to combine the two, essentially provide additive inspection, and then drive that closed-loop process as well. That is a big gap in the industry.”
Identifying gaps like this, whether in the company portfolio or the wider industry, is much of the reason why Krishnan was brought into the company just over a year ago. With Krishnan's second year at 3D Systems now well underway, her work in the next few months will concentrate on making sure those gaps are filled.
“We’re continuing to enhance our individual products, what we can deliver in terms of feature function. We’re doubling down on inspection – particularly additive inspection – as more of our large enterprise customers are showing interest in that area. We’re making our MES platform much more robust,” finished Krishnan. “Those are our focus areas moving forward for 2020 and we think this will allow us to truly regain our identity as a 3D systems solutions company.”
