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The path to industrial digitalisation
Defining your digital future: The path to industrial digitalisation in Additive Manufacturing and beyond Terms such as Industry 4.0, the Digital Thread and the Digital Twin have become familiar buzzwords in manufacturing, but many such terms barely make sense to IT experts, let alone AM professionals. In the crowded and jargon-heavy landscape of solutions for digitalisation, articulating future AM software trends can help offer clarity and confidence in IT investments and give insight into the data-driven future of manufacturing, believes Authentise’s Andre Wegner, who shares his vision of the route to developing an effective digital factory with Metal AM’s Emily-Jo Hopson.
Authentise, based in Mountain View, California, USA, has come a long way from its roots in security and intellectual property protections for AM to establish itself as a leading software and service provider driving the development of connected, modular and open workflow tools for industry. Founded in 2012 by Andre Wegner, a frequent author and speaker as well as Chair of Digital Manufacturing at the nearby Singularity University, the company’s workflow solutions aim to tie all data generated during the AM process together and leverage that data to reduce effort and increase productivity, repeatability and traceability. Application of the technology is no longer limited to the Additive Manufacturing industry, but is regarded as a model for the intelligent digitalisation of manufacturing as a whole. Drawing on the expertise of a team of subject matter experts which includes management consultants, engineers, solution architects and product design officers, Authentise has the knowledge and experience
Vol. 5 No. 2 © 2019 Inovar Communications Ltd
to determine the greatest threats and opportunities posed by digital manufacturing, and understand its impact across the manufacturing segment. To address these threats and opportunities, the company offers specialised software solutions to facilitate the effective digitalisation of manufacturing workflows.
In order to effectively tie the stages of the AM process together, a significant degree of Authentise’s efforts have focused on the development of partnerships and integrations with major machine vendors, CAD vendors and business tool developers to enable the gathering and consolidation of all data in the
Fig. 1 As Additive Manufacturing moves from prototyping to the production of functional series components, new solutions are needed that can help companies access, and make sense of, the huge volumes of data generated
Metal Additive Manufacturing | Summer 2019
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