Reduce Manufacturing Errors and Shipping Delays

whitePaper | March 2, 2020

Discrete manufacturers in Great Britain and around the world have undergone huge transformation in this fourth Industrial Revolution – for a number of reasons. A combination of factors that include economic and market uncertainty, changing customer expectations around technology and a fast-moving green agenda are putting pressure on businesses to hone their supply chains and explore more sustainable and digital business models.

whitePaper | November 30, 2022

The manufacturing and production sectors grapple with significant challenges arising from component failures, which often lead to disruptive operational interruptions. The economic impact of such disruptions can be profound, with every downtime minute potentially translating into thousands of dollars in lost revenue. While regular and planned maintenance can somehow mitigate these unplanned downtimes, they are unable to completely assure against potential component failures.

whitePaper | July 7, 2022

Production scheduling primarily deals with arranging different jobs in various machines based on the timelines for each job. There can be numerous combinations of schedules possible. Production schedules can be designed to maximize the capacity utilization, minimize idle time of the machine, earliness, overall costs etc. Manual design of a schedule can be a tedious and time consuming task. There are a lot of dependencies which the scheduler needs to tweak based on a single change. Generating a production schedule targeting a specific objective function can be done using mathematical models. Mathematical models involve formulating the production scheduling problem as an optimization model wherein there is a certain objective function which needs to be optimized based on a set of constraints. Mathematical models generally outperform manually designed schedules which involve a lot of inter-dependencies among the jobs. Due to improvement in computational power, developing a production schedule using mathematical models is relatively quick and efficient.

whitePaper | March 16, 2022

What is lights-out warehousing? The simple answer is a facility without people. One that relies entirely on automated equipment, to the point that no manual touches are necessary. With no employees required on the floor, operations do not need to turn the lights on, hence the term “lights-out warehousing.”

whitePaper | November 30, 2022

The promise of metal additive manufacturing (AM) to completely transform how core parts are produced has largely been just that: a promise. The ability to 3D print parts has been deployed across countless industries, but limitations within conventional iterations of metal AM have relegated the technology to use primarily in prototyping or niche use cases.

whitePaper | January 9, 2023

Silicone rubber has many applications, from hearing aids to handles and grips on consumer goods. This report provides an overview of 3D printed tooling for silicone part production, including two part injection molds, overmolds, compression molds, and eggshell molds. These methods can be employed for the prototyping of soft silicone products, small-batch production of customer beta units, or production of custom end-use goods. A step-by-step guide is provided for producing a silicone keychain with an encapsulated Apple AirTag, employing mold design best practices from several Formlabs product design customers. We also present information about successful material workflows from Formlabs users, including silicone-resin compatibility and recommended mold releases for both tin and platinum cure silicones.