by Joanne Moretti, CRO – Fictiv
This week: Digital Manufacturing that unlocks AR-Powered Manufacturing
As the Chief Revenue Officer at Fictiv, I take at least 5 hours a week, sometimes more, to be curious about how our customers use the Fictiv Digital Manufacturing platform and the business impact they get from it. This exercise is important to learning and driving towards our mission of “enabling innovators to create”.
And we don’t want them just “creating” we want them to do it quickly to achieve the competitive advantage or first-mover advantage they seek. In this article and future ones, I will share some of my findings in the hopes of loosening up status quo thinking around both what’s possible, and the speed of what’s possible, especially as our customers navigate these unchartered and extremely choppy supply chain waters.
Today’s story is about an innovator called Mira Labs. It discusses how they successfully developed and commercialised a smartphone-powered augmented reality system that helps to digitise and document workflows and connect frontline workers through hands-free AR glasses up into enterprise-ready software/workflows. The Art of the Possible is strong with them.
Mira Labs’ challenges though involved the Speed of the Possible or the lack thereof. Specifically, they were having difficulty finding a manufacturing partner that could supply high-quality custom parts without a costly investment in tooling. They noted that their favourite feature of our Digital Manufacturing Ecosystem (“DME”) was access to HP Multi Jet Fusion capabilities for rapid production of fully functional, cost-effective units. Read that again, no CAPEX.
In addition to CAPEX-free access to high-end 3D Printing resources and capabilities, our digital manufacturing platform is “swiss” in nature, in that its AI-powered computational geometry engine (“compgeo engine”) has no biases towards any one particular manufacturing approach, OEM printing, or machining platform, process, or material. Instead, this “brain” picks the BEST tool/process/materials/geography for the job based on the user-selected variables when configuring their part online!
Variables like lead time desired, materials, process, secondary process, and logistics all go into our compgeo engine to help engineers and supply chain managers (our typical users) determine the cost to build something. In addition to these variables, machine-generated or human design for manufacturability feedback is available to the user to help them build it right.
The fastest quoting time achieved on the platform is 14 seconds, with an average time of a few minutes. Compared to traditional quoting for mechanical parts, which ranges in the days and weeks, speed is delivered from the get-go. Not to mention, the sourcing, vetting, PO creation time, quality checking, etc. that goes into custom part fabrication.
The Result: High-quality, customer-ready units at cycle time reductions overall of 40% or more.
“Mira Labs’ Prism headset is an enterprise-grade wearable that allows businesses to deploy augmented reality,” says Haley Harrington, product design engineer at Mira Labs. “Mira avoids the high barriers to entry often associated with AR, including managing and securing new devices, as well as prohibitive cost.”
The Challenge: Overcoming Slow Production Cycles While Staying Dynamic
Since augmented reality is still in its early phase, solutions can take time to test and validate. Along with the inherent issues that come with new technologies comes a need for agile development, in order to take what’s learned and apply that knowledge to new hardware.
“The challenge lies in producing hardware that is high enough fidelity to get valuable feedback from real people in the world. It needs to work, and work well,” Harrington says. “In an ideal world, we should be able to leave prototypes with customers, so that we can see what it’s like in their everyday lives because that provides us with the most valuable insights.”
However, getting that information back and iterating on the design was a challenge for the team.
Getting the high-resolution parts they needed at low cost, with high quality, and at the speed they needed was difficult.
“Those units need to be produced quickly, relatively inexpensively, and without the investment in tooling that makes design and engineering changes difficult and costly,” Harrington says.
Solution: Changing the Speed of the Possible with Fictiv
The Mira Labs team leveraged Fictiv’s HP Multi Jet Fusion 3D printing capabilities, with economical overseas production to produce fully functional units at high volume.
“Fictiv gave us access to overseas MJF printing that allowed us to quickly produce cost-effective units,” says Harrington.
“Fictiv has allowed us to produce fully functional units at a volume that would traditionally have been very difficult to manage,” Harrington says Multi Jet Fusion gives Mira Labs’ product a polished appearance that’s customer-ready, allowing the company to meet its goal to put prototypes in customers’ hands in exchange for product feedback.
“MJF allows us to produce complete, functional units, with a high-quality look and feel, that we’re able to get into the hands of our customers,” Harrington says. “Through that process, we’re able to get continual feedback and make important improvements to our design.”
To learn more, check out this video that shows Fictiv’s “compgeo” engine in action on the right-hand side of the screen, and a UX animation on the left, including DFM feedback.
For more information, visit www.fictiv.com to load up a diagram and go!