“That is the place all the good things occurs,” shouldn’t be the introduction you may count on when getting into the sorting house of an organization that manufactures, polishes and dyes 1000’s of elements a day.
We’ve walked round greater than half a dozen 3D printing techniques and are about to stroll by a number of part-finishing machines earlier than heading upwards to see the place the subsequent machine instalments will reside, however none of that stirs 3DPRINTUK CEO Nick Allen fairly as a lot as this modest room geared up with just a few screens and trays.
Allen designed the whole constructing, but it surely’s the sorting room – not the 11 EOS P110, three P 396 or three HP Multi Jet Fusion techniques – that we preserve coming again to throughout this tour. The system that powers the corporate’s sorting was constructed in-house from the bottom up some seven years in the past, changing one other system additionally developed by the 3DPRINTUK staff.
“And it’s by no means completed,” Allen says. “We launched [the current order management system] in 2019, after which we transitioned. So, we had a earlier system which we had achieved ourselves as nicely, which was fairly good, but it surely was nothing in comparison with this. We haven’t regarded again.”
We step into the 3DPRINTUK workplaces on a gloriously sunny day in North London, the form of afternoon the place the corporate is getting its cash’s price out of the temperature and humidity management know-how in its manufacturing facility on the bottom ground. In mid-August, 3DPRINTUK is barely much less busy than it’s exterior of vacation season, however there are nonetheless staff dashing round us as we meander by way of the power from type room to 3D printers to dye stations and again to type room. A give attention to ‘batch manufacturing’ with ‘unit value down and amount up’ has meant 3DPRINTUK has at all times been wedded to powder mattress fusion know-how, with EOS and HP being the manufacturers that the corporate is counting on.
Working with these applied sciences, 3DPRINTUK has been profitable in churning out 1000’s of elements a day for a complete host of firms. Working as an e-commerce firm, 3DPRINTUK is barely prone to hear from its clients in worstcase eventualities. For a service bureau, meaning elements not being delivered on time.
Since onboarding the brand new administration order system, 3DPRINTUK has diminished these cases by round 90%. Therefore, Allen feels assured in his reward for the system.
The system covers the whole lot from ‘quoting to accounting to pipelines to postproduction’ and is facilitating the sorting of between 3,500 and 5,000 elements a day. Every half is sorted after the construct, sorted after secondary or tertiary ending, after which sorted once more for transport. It might probably add as much as 15,000 types a day.
Crucially, 3DPRINTUK is monitoring elements not orders, with the monitoring orders deemed inefficient by the corporate. As elements transfer by way of the additive manufacturing workflow, operators are confronted with a wall of thumbnails depicting elements at present shifting by way of the power. Right here, they will enter the variety of elements which were sorted, and the variety of elements which might be nonetheless to be sorted, in addition to any points which have occurred alongside the best way, similar to print defects throughout the construct or elements broken within the polisher. This retains a log of the place elements are as much as within the workflow earlier than a colour-coded system informs customers which elements want what end. On the ultimate stage, elements must be scanned earlier than being packaged, and the system gained’t let workers print labels if elements have been misplaced.
The order administration system not solely guides elements by way of the workflow, but it surely additionally supplies in depth monitoring. 3DPRINTUK retrieves knowledge from all of its printing and post-processing {hardware}, serving to to observe machines, inform operators of the regularity of any points and supply rankings in opposition to essentially the most well-performing techniques. Operators even have entry to graphs and experiences which assess the progress being made in relation to the order queue, in addition to informing the consumer of what actions have been taken as soon as points have been raised. Monitoring can be achieved throughout inventory, KPIs, lead occasions, provide chain, distribution and high quality administration.
3DPRINTUK’s high quality administration capabilities specifically had been described because the ‘among the best’ its auditor had ever seen as the corporate achieved ISO 9001:2015 late final yr. All orders at the moment are processed in opposition to this commonplace.
As 3DPRINTUK has established itself as one of many UK’s main additive manufacturing service bureaus, its order administration system has additionally helped to deal with most of the challenges service suppliers come up in opposition to, whether or not it’s the repeatability of 3D printing know-how or the dependable supply of elements.
“We now have made what we imagine is essentially the most environment friendly system on the planet for what we do,” Allen says, “as a result of we couldn’t discover something off the shelf that might work for us in any diploma of accuracy or velocity.”
