XJDF Building Blocks for the “Printing Industry 4.0”

whitePaper | July 30, 2020

After the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly ground the world to a halt in the first few months of 2020, it created both new challenges for the manufacturing industry and exacerbated those that had existed for some time. According to an article by McKinsey & Company analysts,1 the future we expected by 2020 hasn’t quite come to pass. Rather than a significant shift towards more automation and a smaller workforce, the opposite is true, due in part to the pandemic.

whitePaper | January 17, 2023

For those of us that have been around a while, we have learned to live through the supply and demand cycles of the semiconductor industry. As we are currently in an excess demand situation, one of the big questions we all have is “When will things flip?” We stop short of saying that this will not happen this time, but some key elements are different.

whitePaper | May 26, 2023

Today’s advanced tooling manufacturers want to design and iterate faster, speed up production times, assure yield quality, and improve the durability and performance of their inserts. Achieving all this, and more, is mission critical to the needs of customers in the aerospace, energy, automotive, and other industries for whom the rapid and repeatable production of high-quality cast parts is essential. Until now the limitations of conventional 3D metal printers made it difficult for tooling manufacturers to harness the full potential of additive manufacturing (AM) and advanced tooling manufacturing processes. But no more.

whitePaper | September 30, 2022

Until 2020, progress towards digital transformation for most manufacturers was slow. But the urgency for manufacturers to make successful digital transformations escalated during the first 8-12 months of the global pandemic. As COVID-19 reshaped consumer buying behaviors, the pace jumped from a crawl to a sprint: According to one study, 85% of organizations accelerated their digital transformation initiatives in 2020.[1] Some industry observers believe we witnessed 6.5 years of digital progress in the last eight months of 2020 alone.[2] The pandemic was largely responsible for worldwide supply chain disruptions that slowed down goods production and delivery. As a result, manufacturers justifiably focused on managing and fixing the supply chain problems first. But as the pandemic continued, it became clear that the supply chain issues were a symptom of something deeper than the short-term disruptions.

whitePaper | March 29, 2023

Smart factories have various areas of strengths and weaknesses, just as people do. Strengths bring the opportunity for positive differentiation, whilst weaknesses offer challenges to address in order to deliver consistently on expectation. Many people like to measure their IQ to see how they compare in terms of being “Smart”— so why should we not do the same for the data-driven Smart assembly factory? This helps reveal both strengths and weaknesses, builds the roadmap for improvement and development, increases visibility of unique values, and eliminates risk derived from bottlenecks and inefficiencies. It is time to put our Smart, data-driven manufacturing operation to the test, ensuring preparedness as the industry transforms toward the elusive Industry 4.0.

whitePaper | November 11, 2022

A fast-changing world forces companies to adapt faster. This creates special challenges for their digitalization initiatives. Composability and no-code technologies enables companies not only to keep up with changes. They allow them also to react rapidly and proactively and even use changes as an opportunity to achieve competitive advantages