IT TAKES TWO

Sam Davies explores a point of friction between MES and OEM firms when establishing partnerships for API access.

Apanel of additive manufacturing (AM) software business leaders is sat silent as one voice dares to suggest what he believes many others are thinking. Minutes go by. And then, a passionate, frustrated monologue reaches its conclusion.

Some smirk, others nod, and one offers hushed applause. In front of more than 100 AMUG Conference delegates, Andre Wegner calls for his peers on the panel – which includes representatives of Materialise, AMFG and 3YOURMIND –to never pay an upfront fee to an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) for API access ever again.

Just like that, those in attendance have been made aware of a point of friction between MES providers and 3D printing hardware vendors. What’s more, a customer base has been introduced to the prospect of division when it is screaming out for collaboration.

At Formnext, Wegner, the Authentise CEO, elaborated on his position.

“A system like Authentise, workflow management in general, has two main objectives,” he explained. “One is [to] increase efficiency. So, we reduce the total cost of ownership [for] production. The second is that we capture the data and create a full digital thread, and therefore make it more reliable, and suitable to higher quality industries. Those two things mean we're helping OEMs sell more machines – we’re reducing the cost and we’re increasing the types of markets that they can [sell into].”

The APIs – or Application Programming Interfaces – at the heart of this matter are intermediaries that open up access to data fields, such as process history, print temperatures or slicing software. MES providers exist to capture that data from the AM workflow, harnessing it to improve quality control, increase uptime and reduce costs. These – those in the industry could surely agree – are vital steps forward should the technology become the volume manufacturing tool many believe it can be. As a result, 3D printing hardware OEMs have sought to align with these MES providers through strategic partnerships, such as the one between Solukon and Authentise, or Markforged and 3YOURMIND.

“Why do we have to partner with these guys? Because they are established companies whose core competency is [MES],” said Kai Witter, DyeMansion Chief Customer Officer. “Our core competency is industrialising postprocessing and they need data. So, if we don’t do that, the production line of tomorrow will not happen, or it will take a long time.”

“MES and OEM cooperation means a shift towards a more flexible, scalable and individual manufacturing process design, all leading to a higher degree of process automation in the end,” added Solukon CEO/CTO Andreas Hartmann. “Data is key to achieve this and the only way to collect and evaluate process data in a sufficient way is cooperation.”

Threatening that cooperation is the fact that some don’t see eye to eye when it comes to establishing the terms of collaboration. Wegner claims that he and his company are not the only MES providers in AM space resisting the charges OEMs place on partners looking for API access.

But the OEMs that do, have their reasons, Markforged Director, Software Project Management Doug Kenik told TCT.

Currently, Markforged is not a company that charges its MES partners upfront, owing to the fact it selects the collaborators it wants to work with, as opposed to having an open partner programme. Through his time at Teton Simulation, however, he has dealt with companies who do require a fee to access their APIs. And there are multiple reasons for those charges to exist.

“If we were providing a service to the partner, there might be a consideration of