K. lenaerts, Materialise, Leuven, Belgium
The demands towards the performance, reliability and repeatability of Additive Fabrication (AF) processes (a term combining Rapid Prototyping, Rapid Manufacturing, 3D Printing and so on) have increased substantially over the past few years. In order to keep up with these demands, more advanced software systems are needed to guide the design and manufacturing process. These include among others technological software solutions to automate the work preparation steps as much as possible and to facilitate communication, (semi-)automatic and interactive planning systems, and easy traceability and quality control methods. Furthermore, AF enables series manufacturing of personalized designs, which is only possible with optimized design automation solutions.Machines and materials both have to be reliable and of high quality to meet the expectations. However, covering the entire process from customer order until physical part(s) delivered to the customer is something out of the scope of machines and materials. It is the task of software to control the AF process and to make it fully traceable.
Summary: Delivering reliable quality within a reliable lead time are the 2 most important competitive criteria for every RP&M production environment. Both of these criteria are only manageable by using the correct tools to improve communication, to increase traceability, to further automate data preparation, to optimize the planning and to follow up the actual status of the machines.
