Spare Parts 3D has developed DigiPART, an AI-based software solution to facilitate the creation of digital inventory and enable adoption of AM in industries.
Spare Parts 3D (SP3D), with offices in Paris (HQ) and Singapore, has been helping companies adopt Additive Manufacturing (AM) in their supply chains as part of the solutions to address spare parts problems: spare parts obsolescence, long lead time, high cost of inventory, MOQ etc.
AM adoption brings up multiple obstacles that can be overwhelming: incomplete part data (lack of dimensions, materials, drawings), lack of in-house AM knowledge, picking which part to print, estimating how much savings can be achieved, dealing with limited manpower, etc.
Spare Parts 3D has developed DigiPART, a powerful AI-based software solution to facilitate the creation of Digital Inventory and enable the adoption of AM in industries. DigiPART identifies the parts that are technically 3D printable and those that make business sense, thus getting tangible results faster and creating value for your company and supply chain. It sifts through very large inventories, does not require drawings, and has been designed to operate with partial data set. Results are fully transparent and traceable.
In last two years, conventional supply chains have been challenged with COVID, the Suez blockage, the Russian war in Ukraine and the China lockdown. The new keywords are Agility and Resilience, and additive manufacturing and digital inventory have brought in innovative solutions to these challenges.
Adoption of Additive Manufacturing does not happen overnight. It is a journey that involves external parties (OEM, end user, Service Bureaus) and internal stakeholders (Engineering, Supply Chain, Procurement, Legal, QHSE, Field Operation team) that need to be convinced of the value of Additive Manufacturing.
In this journey, our customers have shared with us some of their pain points: identification of part to print, inefficiencies and associated costs, lack of in-house AM knowledge etc.
We would like to share with you how two of our customers have started their journey to adoption of Additive Manufacturing and how our funnel approach helped them focus quickly on the right parts.
The first customer is Ocyan, a company specialising in the offshore oil and gas industry in Brazil and abroad. Ocyan wanted to investigate whether it was possible to reduce parts lead time and inventory cost and get quick wins to onboard management and operational teams. In eleven weeks, DigiPART-enabled the project team to analyze 17,000 spare parts from Ocyan’s inventory (with no 3D files). Various supply chain issues were looked at (lead time reduction, minimum order quantity optimization, simple cost reduction, etc.), and the number of viable AM parts totaled up to 11% of the total parts analyzed.
The Ocyan team took the results from the analysis and used DigiPART to focus first on parts with cost reduction potential and low criticality. This gave way to the first additively manufactured part in the company’s history. What was also achieved by the Ocyan team, beyond the actual building of a part, was the creation of a common framework to develop an AM adoption roadmap for spare parts. Ocyan had started its AM journey.
The company now plans to focus on metal parts with a strong lead time reduction business case and with materials the company is comfortable with, such as 316L. It also plans to look at more innovative solutions, such as replacing metal parts with high-end polymers, which could bring significant savings.
The second customer is a National Oil Company is the Middle East for whom we recently completed a spare parts catalog analysis of 150,000 references. It had clear objectives and KPI when it came to savings in inventory cost and capital spare, and percentage of digitalization. We completed an analysis of its 150,000 SKUs in 6 months. Although 80% of the data were missing at least one important piece of information (i.e.: dimension, weight or material for example), DigiPart was able to operate with partial data and narrow it down to a first opportunity list of 200 parts.
Digipart was able to identify which printing technology could cover most of the printable parts and based on quantity, helped to look at whether printing should be considered in-house or outsourced.
According to our customer, the cost of a ‘hit and miss’ approach was too high and slowed down the progress too much. They confirmed this analysis sped up their AM deployment by two years.
To this date, DigiPart has over 3,300 solutions (printing technology, raw material) and has analyzed over one million lines.
Our funnel Approach increases efficiency by going from large to a more manageable catalogue. DigiPARTTM makes the identification process fast and automated, frees up resources, and palliates to lack of in-house AM experts on the customer side.
In both cases, SP3D was both an enabler and accelerator of the adoption of Additive Manufacturing, greatly reducing the time to perform Inventory analysis and quickly pointing out parts that were matching these companies’ business cases.
These companies made the leap and started their journey to AM Adoption. What are you waiting for?