Turning Data into Dollars: Streamlining Operations for Optimal Factory Returns

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STEPHEN HOOPER: All right. Welcome back, everyone. Thanks to those of you who have just joined us, I want to welcome you to our first ever digital factory symposium at Autodesk University. I'm Stephen Hooper, Vice President for Design and Manufacturing here at Autodesk. And in this session, we'll hear more from three leaders on how they're monitoring, automating, and streamlining operations to improve efficiency in the factory and deliver greater return on investment.

Now, if you haven't already, make sure you check out the factory experience that's just across the hall. Look out for a guy, Jonathan Odom. He'll walk you through the process of designing, manufacturing, and operations through an interactive experience where you can build your own consumer product and take it home with you today.

Now, to take us into our next session, we have a very special speaker. Let's hear from Max Lobovsky, CEO at Formlabs, to learn how they're using data to make informed decisions to improve operational efficiency and cost management. And I do want to say a special thanks to Max, because last year we ran an event together co-hosted between Formlabs and Autodesk digital factory, which has spawned the idea for today. So we have a special relationship with Max, and it's a pleasure to have him here. So thanks, Max. The stage is yours.

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MAX LOBOVSKY: Thank you Stephen. Hello, everybody. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about Formlabs, what we do, and where we are going in the future. So we started the company because-- we make 3D printers. And we started this company because we were really inspired by what making is like in the digital world, and we wanted to bring that to the physical world.

So these are the Google guys in the garage, where they started the company. And this photo makes me jealous because these guys were able to start in enormous, very impactful, important company, and they were able to start in a garage without a lot of resources. They raised some money along the way, but compared to the speed and scale with which they were able to bring amazing products to the world, it took relatively little resources.

And this story has become common in the software world. But meanwhile in the physical world, it doesn't work like that. This is Formlabs first factory where we built the form one, and coincidentally, it's not far from here, it's outside San Diego. And this is what it took to get anything out the door. It takes a lot more resources, and space, and infrastructure, and money to even get a first kind of minimum viable product out. And anyone who makes physical things knows this. It's just the name of the game. Things are more expensive, take longer. But maybe it doesn't have to be that way.

So we think that what it really comes down to is tools. And this is an injection molding tool, and it kind of visually captures the tools that are involved with manufacturing. They are big, and heavy, and expensive, and take time to make. And if you compare this to digital tools, software tools, you can download them, learn to use them, get running and make stuff very quickly. You can try things, change things, iterate, and that's part of what-- that's what makes software so much faster.

So we think we need better tools in the physical world, and that's the mission of our company, to build the tools that make it possible for anyone to bring their ideas to life. That's what we've been doing since the beginning of the company. We do it across a range of hardware, software, and materials. This is the form for EL. We actually just announced this yesterday, so it's the latest generation of our stereolithography, high-resolution 3D printers.

And we've also got a smaller size form for. And then we do SLS or powdered plastic type of printers as well, selective laser sintering. And we have a line up of the hardware products that you need there. In every case, our printers are usually 1/5 to 1/10 the cost of similar systems that were out there and much easier to use. And so we're really trying to get more of this technology into the world for professionals, but much more accessible than what existed before.

As a result, we've shipped more than 130,000 printers, so we've more professional 3D printers than any other company in the world, including some that were around since the '80s. So that's yeah, printers and then materials is just as important a piece of what we do. We develop materials, we manufacture them in our own facility. And when people are making something with 3D printers, it's not just the printer they care about-- actually, they don't really care about the printer, they care about the finished part. And the finished part is the sum of the hardware, software, and materials working together. And if you want that part to have good material properties, you need a range of great materials.

So we push for stiffer, stronger, higher temperature, cetera. And the result is printers are used in a huge range of industries and applications. Companies like Ford using in product development to move faster, or another automotive example, Brazil and Germany with jigs and fixtures and tools, and even some end use parts that help them get things made.

Ford sums it up as, the printer has already changed the way we design and produce parts, helping us drive efficiency in our product development, and lots more comments like that from Microsoft, and Black Diamond, sports equipment company, Hasbro, the toy company, Dental is another big segment for us, NASA, you name it. So a lot of applications for what we do.

So that kind of brings us to today, just launched 4L yesterday, so we have-- I don't think we're done. I definitely won't say we're done, but we've made a lot of progress since our initial product that we launched 12 years ago, the Form 1. Towards this goal of an out of the box system, where you can bring a 3D model in and get it printed quickly and easily and not worry about it, and that's kind of been like our main focus up until now.

And it's taken a lot of innovations to get there. Things like automatic support, structure generation and cartridges. So there's less mess to deal with and quick release build platforms, remote monitoring, all this sort of stuff. All towards this goal of in out of the box, easy to use system. But we haven't been able to serve everything that people want to do with 3D printers while we've focused on these kind of 80, 20 applications, the things that most people want to do.

And along the way, as we keep getting questions where we can't say yes, like, can I print a specialty material that you don't have? Can I print a higher resolution? Can I automate job setup? Can I speed up printing of this part? And so people always want us to push limits on these things. And we usually have to say, not yet, or we're working on it. And starting today we want to say something different, which is yes, you can. Here are the keys. You can do it yourself. Or even better, it would be someone's already built that in our ecosystem, and you can have access to it.

So what I'm talking about is opening up a developer platform for our products. So to go beyond focusing on just the out of box use case and enable people to push the limits of what you can do with our printers. There's people developing products that are made with 3D printing, not just where it's part of the development process, but where the final product is made with 3D printing. They often need to push the limits of what you can do with 3D printing.

There's people running 3D printing factories that need to drive costs, and yields, and things like that. There's people developing 3D printer materials that expand what you can do. So this is kind of who we want to-- who we think of as developers and who we want to enable on our platform.

And so the Formlabs developer platform has a couple of different pieces to it. And I'll just go through each of them quickly. There's open material mode, print settings editor, and the Formlabs API. And each of these kind of open up and let us answer Yes to those different questions. First up is the open material mode. Now, there are other printers on the market that are fully open where you can run whatever materials you want on them, but they've generally been kind of hobbyist, or lower performing systems.

What we're excited about is bringing open materials system to a best in class technology. So like with Form 4, there's a mixer system that you can see there, temperature control for the materials, resin dispensing, all these things add up to make it not just open to run materials on, but the best system to develop new materials on and push the limits of what's possible. And an open material mode is available on all of our printers.

Next up is print settings editor. To make materials work on a printer you've got to fine tune the print process, change different parameters. And so we are opening up access to that. And it's both for new materials that you might want to run on our printers, as well as pushing the performance of existing materials that we have. So for any given part, you can usually get more performance out of the system if you fine tune the print process just for that part. So you want to print it faster or more accurately, and so we're enabling access to those settings.

And here's just a quick demo, if you want to print out a finer layer thickness than what we enable out of the box. It's pretty quick to open up the settings and create a new set of parameters based on our existing ones, targeting finer layer thickness. And these settings can be saved, and exported, and shared.

And again, here we're not just going for that it's open and that you can do these things, but that it's done really well. So really good documentation around the settings, the ability to share those settings. And one really important thing is maintaining the consistency of the print performance. So if you take that settings file and run it on a different printer or a different version of software, you still get the same results.

And then the last piece is our API. So there's our software, main piece of software and our printer system. There's preform, which is where you set up a 3D model to print, and fleet control, which lets you monitor and control multiple printers. And those systems have been, again, built to be easy to use by a person out of the box, but now we want to enable them to plug-in to other people's software systems. And so we're building in an API for that.

The API is HTTP, JSON based. You can use it interface with it locally off the network or there's a network based version. And I got a couple of demos here of things you can do with it. We're still in the really early days here, so these are just the beginning of demonstrating what you could do with it. So first up is this would be if you're in a higher volume printing environment, like a dental lab, for example, that's getting many orders of different parts in this demo automates job setup.

So you basically-- there's a short Python script that we put together to do this with the API, but you point it to a folder of 3D models, STL files, and it will go through and pack build platforms of the printer with those models. And what it's doing here is it's checking how many fit on that build platform and then creating new job setups as necessary until it completes that folder.

And then at the end, it's actually uploading it directly to our cloud queue system, which would get those jobs running directly on a printer. So very easy way to build like a fully automated order management to printer system with this API. And that script is just a couple hundred lines of code pretty quick to put together.

And then next is another demo. We call this one speedrun.pi. And this one combines print settings, editing, and the API together. So I was talking about how you can speed up if you tune parameters. You can usually get faster print for a given job, but that takes a little bit of knowledge of the system and usually a little bit of iterative process, change a parameter print, see what comes out. So this tool helps you do that faster.

You can think of it as like a process engineer, automated process engineer. So what it does is you give the tool a job like this. Currently this job takes three hours to print with our default settings. And then you. It knows of a couple of different known ways to speed up jobs. And you can ask it to give you a range of settings files with those speed ups.

And if there's parameters to vary, it can sweep those parameters. And so in this case, it came up with six different settings files to try that have a range of different print time improvements. And now you would want to verify that it works well, so it can automatically create those jobs and send them to a printer and hopefully help you achieve 10, 20%, 30% speed ups.

So yeah, those are a couple of examples. The code for those is going to be available in the documentation for the API. And these demos are really targeted at developers who are going to build things with our developer platform. But ultimately, we hope this is going to make a big impact for all users of our products as we build out much better set of tools and ecosystem and integrations.

So we are working with all the important CAD companies in our space, of course, Autodesk on improved integrations that will let you go from CAD, to job setup to printer more smoothly and easily using the API. Yeah. So that's the developer platform. This is really the beginning of a new phase for the company. We're going to continue to do well on the out of box use case, but we really want to build on that and enable people who want to push the limit of what's possible with 3D printing to build on our system and to leverage what we have already built. And I'm hopeful that this is going to grow the industry and technology and make it more valuable for everybody. Thank you.

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We've got a booth just around the corner. If you want to see our printers after the talk.

ADRIAN FINCH: Great. Well, thanks Max. Appreciate the presentation here. So it was great to hear how you're enabling your customers to really drive efficiency in their factories. I'm Adrian Finch, Senior Audience Marketing Manager here on the design and manufacturing team. You've been used to seeing Steve all day, but he had to rock to get ready for the design and manufacturing keynote at 4:30, though I secretly think he found you all to be too intimidating and needed to leave before he got too nervous.

So to round us out today, I'd like to welcome James Pastre, the Quality Assurance Manager, and Craig Booth, Finance Analyst at IG Masonry Support Services, to share how they've grown as a business and improved efficiency to really drive costs, control, and improve quality for their customers.

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JAMES PASTRE: Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm James Pastre.

CRAIG BOOTH: Hey, good afternoon. I'm Craig Booth, Finance Analyst.

JAMES PASTRE: So as Adrian said we work for a company called IG Masonry Support. As people ask what is IG Masonry Support? And in a few slides, we'll get to that. But imagine a world where your manufacturing processes are not just efficient, but seamlessly integrated and optimized to perfection. Welcome to the future with Autodesk Fusion operations and IG Masonry Support, where innovation meets excellence.

So IG Masonry Support is part of the Keystone group, which there are 17 brands spanning three divisions in structural steel, timber, and building components. At IG Masonry Support, we have combined experience with innovation to design and manufacture the most practical and advanced range of patented, stainless steel masonry support products, and revolutionary brick slip soffit systems for the construction industry. Some of the product ranges are shown below. These are masonry support. We've got brick slip soffit systems, windposts, and we also offer brick cutting services as well.

So we've produced a brief video just providing everybody a brief overview of the Keystone group.

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- Our unwavering commitment to quality guarantees products that deliver lasting performance while meeting the highest environmental standards. We continually improve our manufacturing processes with the latest technology to boost output and reduce our carbon footprint. Seeing a valued customer behind every order and giving our best every day, that's where our employees make the difference. We embrace a culture in which quality and customer satisfaction are recognized as a personal commitment.

We believe in hard work and common sense. We refuse to be beaten and we live by our core values, including honesty, integrity, and social responsibility. We employ over 2,000 talented people across 28 manufacturing sites for 18 leading brands, with 1.6 million square feet of factory space and a turnover of 330 pounds million per year.

We serve thousands of valued customers and our business is expanding further across Europe, Australia, and the USA. As we look ahead to the next 35 years and beyond, our focus will remain on innovation, providing best in class service, and delivering solutions that help the construction industry in its drive for greener, smarter, and safer buildings.

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Founded in 2015, IG Masonry Support achieved a total turnover of about $5.6 million. Over the years, we have consistently increased our annual turnover, reaching $31.7 million in 2023, which represents a remarkable 468% growth in revenue. We forecast for the following five years will be in line with our current projections, and a larger amount of this will be in North America.

We are pleased to present another brief video detailing the benefits of Autodesk Fusion Operations. Please note that at the time of the recording, Autodesk Fusion Operations was previously known as Prodsmart.

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- Our ability now to keep track of production downtime means that we're more able to pinpoint the bottlenecks and act quickly to rectify them. So before using Prodsmart tracking and traceability was slow and tedious. Now, we have mostly automated the process. It's quicker, easier, and more reliable.

- We have millions of pounds worth of materials and stock, as well as hundreds of employees, all of this needs to be organized and that's why we turn to Prodsmart.

- Our previous software wasn't able to give us the amount of control we required. With Prodsmart, this has given us full control over each process. One example is how we have been able to restrict access to certain operators with read or write access to minimize errors.

- I wanted to invest in Prodsmart because we quote for very large projects here that can be individually over a value of a million pounds. And our contractors want us to stick to that quote once we've quoted the value of it, and we were completely sure of our production costs at the time. So we invested in Prodsmart to give us better visibility of our actual production costs in real time, which then led us to improve our quoting system to be more accurate at the front end of our quoting.

- So Prodsmart has given us a lot of avenues for tackling these problems that we never knew had existed within our process. This, in turn, has saved us a lot of time and a lot of money along the way, as all the projects we manufacture are bespoke. It is great to have a tool to help manage our time and workforce. We have now a reliable system to allow us to adapt to the challenges each new project brings.

At the end of the day, everything we are doing with Prodsmart is to optimize efficiency, which in turn brings value to us and our customers, and improves costs.

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So one of the challenges that we faced was with health and safety. This was managing the daily maintenance checklist for the machinery that we had on the shop floor. Before implementing fusion operations, operators completed these checks on paper. Team leaders were then responsible for collecting and reviewing all of these checks before the morning production meeting. And in a steel fabrication facility, this paper-based process led to numerous issues such as lost, damaged or illegible documents. These problems often prevented us from identifying early signs of machinery downtime.

Fusion operations has enabled us to reduce machinery downtime and through preventative maintenance checks, allowing us to address minor issues before they escalate into major problems that could halt production and incur additional costs, such as overtime. The system has simplified the creation and completion of the health and safety checks for the operators on the shop floor, and personnel within IG Masonry Support can now create health and safety checklists in a matter of minutes. And the user interface is straightforward, allowing operators to easily mark items as pass or fail instead of navigating through drop down menus.

Once completed, these daily maintenance reports are automatically sent to the team leaders via a PDF, as a PDF via emails, saving them time in the morning and allowing them to focus on more critical tasks. This centralized data collection facilitates the discussion of immediate corrective actions during the morning production meetings. Additionally, fusion operations supports multiple languages, accommodating our diverse workforce, which includes speakers of English, Polish, and Latvian, and this feature ensures all workers can use their system in their preferred language.

CRAIG BOOTH: All right. We're going to move on to stock management and traceability. IG Masonry Support identified a need for improvement of our stock management and traceability, which has been significantly enhanced by the implementation of Fusion Operations. Prior to adopting Fusion Operations, tracking the usage and origin of our steel sheets and A1 five-rated boards was a tedious process.

Inefficient procedures also complicated our stock management efforts. We were unable to accurately report the quantity and cost of stock products in real time. This lack of effective stock management and traceability necessitated regular audits to verify livestock levels for each product, identifying any discrepancies between recorded levels and actual consumption by operators.

Fusion Operations has made stock management and traceability more efficient and accurate. We introduced and implemented a barcode system to batch products for better traceability. Fusion Operations enables operators to work on a specific, or multiple, or multiple production orders, allowing them to consume and allocate stainless steel sheets or A1 fire-rated boards effectively.

JAMES PASTRE: So IG Masonry Support is certified by the British Board of Agreement, the BBA, who conduct of audits and have-- they have been very complimentary of the Fusion Operations software for how simple it is and easy it has made retrieving records such as mill certificates and for sheets used during the production process.

CRAIG BOOTH: With the implementation of the barcoding system and its full operational integration, we can now generate automatic email alerts for our stock products when quantities reach a minimum threshold. Thanks to the advancements made by Fusion Operations and IG Masonry Support, we have streamlined our monthly stock audits by 40% resulting in a time saving of 45 minutes per person each month.

JAMES PASTRE: So as we come on to quality and assurance, quality control and assurance, we needed a system to store and control versions of drawings and the in-process quality checks that we had created. Additionally, we needed to streamline the documentation and retrieval of quality checklists by that were being completed by the operators and team leaders during the manufacturing process.

Prior to the Fusion Operations, these quality checklists were completed on paper, which was noted in the health and safety slide were difficult for document retrieval team leaders as responsible for conducting approval checks on products before they proceed to the next stage in the manufacturing process. However, we lacked a proper method for storing drawings accessible for the operations team.

Consequently, all drawings had to be printed out and included in the production packs for the teams on the shop floor. This paper-based process presented challenges, particularly when drawings were updated. Operators were often unaware of the changes, leading to use of outdated production drones, and to prevent this, we had to halt production.

Fusion Operations has improved version control by allowing drones to be uploaded to specific production orders, enabling production teams to quickly access the latest versions for reference. The system also allows us to allocate specific quality checklists to individual products operations, and requiring operators and team leaders to complete in-process and final approval checks.

By using Fusion Operations, we can also deactivate jobs when revisions are needed, preventing operators from working on them. Operators have inquired about this visibility before in the past, and it was confirmed that a job was undergoing a design change, and that's why it was put on hold. Once revised and reissued, the production order is then reactivated, allowing operators to resume their work.

CRAIG BOOTH: All right, moving on to production planning and crossings. IG Masonry Support sought to invest in a system that could streamline production, and enhance the competitiveness of our quotations, and reduce costs across the business. Prior to implementing Fusion Operations, we relied on outdated software that lacked control and editable access. Our production planning was based on this data, which often led to inaccuracies if team leaders did not update their production records.

Without this system, we were unable to accurately capture the time operators spent on production orders. Given that we quote projects valued at approximately $1 million, improving our tracking was essential for generating more accurate quotes. Fusion Operations have significantly reduced our overall business operating costs by lowering labor expenses through improved quality, reducing printing costs by storing drawings digitally, and streamlining rework processes through better stock management of steel sheet offcuts.

Additionally, we have integrated Fusion Operations into our office environment to track time spent on quoting, structural checks, and handovers. This integration has enabled us to achieve our goal of generating more competitive quotations. Briefly on margins, IG Masonry Support has integrated Fusion Operations data via an API link into Power BI. This versatile system is utilized company wide, providing management with easy access to high level custom reports.

Fusion Operations enables us to identify costs across all departments, so office and the shop floor, allowing managers to monitor the time and financial resources allocated to each project. As illustrated on the slide, we've got all the production hours for the welding, the cutting, the pressing, packing, steel quality checks, and all the nesting of the products. It gives us the hours and the minutes. We then transfer it into a cost, and then it works out, and then we work on the margins, and things like that, so we've always the-- we've got the invoice value, fixing costs, and then it will work out the margins for us.

Cost savings and future savings. At IG Masonry Support, we are dedicated to continuous improvement and consistently seek opportunities to reduce our overall costs. This year, we've generated approximately 40,000 drawings using our AutoCAD detailing software. Previously, all these drawings were printed on A3 paper for production purposes. However, with the implementation of Fusion Operations, we have transitioned 65% of these drawings to a digital format, resulting in an annual saving of $24,000.

Looking ahead, we are focused on further advancements and anticipate additional savings of another 16,000 by integrating the remaining 35% of the drawings onto Fusion Operations. We've just got a few future ones for 2025, again, where we just show you the values in pounds and dollars for the labor and the printing costs. So again, we're always looking to save money every year.

JAMES PASTRE: So that concludes our presentation. We would like to just briefly thank Autodesk University for one, inviting us out and allowing us to do this presentation. And also personally thank the guys from Prodsmart for their continued support and everything that they've done over the years and looking forward to years to come.

CRAIG BOOTH: If you've got any questions, feel free. But if not, we'll be up in the community thing later on straight after, anyway, if you want to know any more details. Someone's got one.

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AUDIENCE: bringing in a new system, there can be challenges with change management and people bringing in new systems in. How did you overcome those challenges and how did you get the buy in from everyone within IG Masonry Support?

CRAIG BOOTH: It's a hard work and you've got to get down on the shop floor. You've literally got to get down and dirty, really. You've got to trust the guys, explain what you want from them. And if they trust you, you trust them, it works both ways. And I've spent hours shifts down there and talking to welders, talking to packaging operators, seeing what they do for eight hours to 10 hours every day.

I think when they see somebody come from an office environment down onto a shop floor, they'll basically give you whatever they want. And at the moment, we are still doing that with our brick cutting services, so we're in transition with those as well at the moment. So we get it. We're getting there with them as well. Yep. Yep. Good. That's it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.

JAMES PASTRE: Thank you all.

CRAIG BOOTH: We'll go that way. We'll go that way.

ADRIAN FINCH: Thank you. You did great. All the way from the UK, did great. So thanks everyone for joining today's session. This is our last session of the digital factory symposium program. And of course, a huge thank you to all of our speakers today and to anyone who stuck around for all three sessions. So if this symposium has left you wanting more on digital factory, then come join us in Germany for the Autodesk Innovation Forum in May. This is our annual mobility industry event, which will bring together business leaders and subject matter experts to really share ideas and their expertise on topics like design collaboration, manufacturing, digital transformation, sustainability, you name it, we'll talk about it.

So now, I hope you'll all join me in heading over to the design and manufacturing keynote, where you'll hear from Steve Hooper as well as our other Autodesk executives on the exciting innovations within the platform and Autodesk Fusion. And so you'll hear how our customers are leveraging technology to really achieve better outcomes and also help customers like you to really make the future. So thanks, everyone. Appreciate you joining.