Building a manufacturing dashboard for my business

[gaud_complex]

Hi everyone! It’s been a very long time since I’ve posted here, but having picked up a Form 4 this last year, I wanted to share a project I’ve been working on to help manage my business and hopefully improve customer experience.

A challenge I’ve had has been keeping everything for a given order – models, communications, quotes/invoices, etc – organized. I’ve also found that during the model review process, often times I’m giving similar feedback from a DFM perspective. So, to help with this, I’ve been building a dashboard that gives customers a smoother experience placing an order (including providing a rudimentary DFM analysis) and interacting with me throughout the manufacturing process. It also gives me a convenient place to keep everything organized.

Customer View

The main dashboard view shows high level details about a customer’s order history: number of orders, projects, total parts, aggregated statuses i.e. X order pending, Y orders in progress, etc. The orders tab shows a list of all orders in a pseudo Jira-style view (all displayed here are test orders).

On the order detail page, customers can upload models and individually assign print technology, material, and resolution to parts, or can use bulk actions to do the same. When a technology is chosen, a rudimentary DFM analysis is run that evaluates manifold geometry, thin walls, and hollow regions/enclosed voids.

The DFM analysis provides some detail about the issues found and the severity of the issue.

You can view the model, rendered approximately in the color of the material it’ll be printed in.

And, taking inspiration from PreForm, if there are internal voids, you can see where they are.

Customers can also view the bounding box and how the part fits within the build volume of the printer. If the part is larger than the build volume, depending on how much larger, they’ll be presented with a warning that the part may need to be split to be printed.

The DFM analysis also looks for thin-walled/hollow parts with drain holes.

Once the customer is satisfied with the order, they click a “submit” button, and the order then shows up on my side for review.

Admin/Manufacturer View

I can then create a quote and get shipping rates. The initial estimate for weight and required box size uses the bounding box volumes of all the parts in the order, along with the estimated mass of the parts, with some margin for packaging. The box selection is just a set of boxes that I have listed as my standard sizes, but custom boxes are an option as well. The shipping rates use EasyPost.

The quote gets sent to the customer for review and they can accept/reject it. If multiple quote revisions are created, there is a revision history view so both parties can see how the order has evolved.

After the quote is accepted, I can generate a manual invoice and upload it, or use the invoice/payment processor I use (currently Wave, but it’s configurable for other services).

The invoice gets generated and sent to the customer, which can be paid online.

The dashboard automatically tracks shipments once the label is generated and will move it through the shipment workflow at the top of the order page. It’ll also track invoice payment status.

Additional features not covered in this post include:

• a chat feature if additional order discussions are necessary (can upload attachments – photos/references)
• an NDA generator: the customer can opt-in to using an NDA if desired and a templated NDA will be provisioned and both parties asked for signatures.
• an order history tracker which shows all the status/state transitions of the order. Thinking ahead this is more for audit purposes.
• on my side there’re several metrics tracked to help me better understand how my business is operating and what customers are using/interested in.
• email notifications for order status changes and aggregated chat messages.
• longer-term I want to try to connect it with APIs from the printers I use to have more real-time statuses/data

Anyway, there’re probably a few things I’m missing, but I wanted to share this project as I’m planning on making it live in the next couple weeks and I’m looking forward to seeing how it helps my business and helps add transparency/reduce friction on the customer side.

Is there anything that I might be missing that you think would be useful? For those of you that run print shops, is this something that you’d find useful?

Thanks for reading and thanks for the feedback!

[serret]

First of all : wow
This is an amazing dashboard.

I’m not personally running a print shop, but I manage the printing for my company and I definitely need better dedicated tool to keep things more organized like that.

( I currently use the Microsoft Teams Planner feature, which is not really ideal )

One thing I did not see is the metric for resin usage on your side ? But perhaps you handle that somewhere else ?

On the client side an estimate on the production delay would be a nice addition too. While I understand many factors could impact such a date, an approximation is always welcome from the client side.

[leonhart88]

I’d be interested in potentially trying something like this. It’s been on my list to look at a low cost solution to quoting but either haven’t had time or the services lacked some features

[gaud_complex]

Thanks for the feedback!

@serret you’re right, resin usage is not yet currently tracked. The analytics tab on my side wasn’t shown, but it currently track parts printed per technology (SLA, FDM, CFF, SLS, etc.), orders by status (submitted, in review, in progress, shipped, etc.), and revenue stats (total quoted, total paid, outstanding, avg. order value). I think resin usage, at least for the model, is relatively straightforward as resin used is roughly the model volume. A challenge is determining support volume. Default support settings might be easier to approximate given enough data, but if you run lean in the support economy, that might make auto-determining that a little harder. Perhaps there could be a setting that scales approximate support volume based on a few factors – currently working on a method to determine model complexity as part of the DFM analysis, and perhaps that could be used here.

I’ve been focusing mostly on SLA at the moment, but am working to incorporate analyses for other print technologies as well.

As for production estimate, the client can set a deadline, but additional granularity would be nice. I could add an estimate that, as a first swing, is manually entered on the manufacturer side. Print time estimating is not in the dashboard yet – was thinking about running the PreForm server to estimate that, but it could also be empirically determined with enough data. Anyway, thanks for your thoughts! If there’s anything else you think of, let me know. I’ll plan to post back with updates.

@leonhart88 is there anything else you’re specifically interested in for quoting? The tool currently:

• Calculates bounding box, surface area, and model volume vs. printer volume
• DFM analysis:
  • thin walls and small feature detection
  • pocket features where resin might be hard to remove
  • void and hollow body and drain hole detection. At the moment I classify voids as being fully enclosed cavities and hollow bodies as have a drain hole, but I’ll probably evolve that based on wall thickness e.g. something that has a fully enclosed void and the void volume is ~75% of the model volume is intuitively hollow, where as a void that’s <50% the body volume is a void. Wall thickness can also derate the severity of a void/hollow body.
  • model complexity based on layer island count, cross-sectional area variance, curvature analysis, and a few other things I’m forgetting about.

Here’s an example part with a hollow region with drain hole detection. It currently doesn’t evaluate wall thickness vs. void so see if the walls are sufficiently thick, but that’s something I’m working on.

[leonhart88]

To be honest, I’m not sure. My business is a bit different than most printing shops because I have a lot of other manufacturing equipment which ultimately still requires me to quote in a different way. I haven’t yet found something that would solve all my problems aside from a custom solution, although I honestly haven’t looked that hard and it’s possible that something like this could still move the needle even if it only handled a certain part of my business.

I’m open to chatting more and evaluating your software in the future, just let me know when it’s available.

[gaud_complex]

Will do. Thanks!

[serret]

In my company we need to order resin per project so I always go on preform to create support before giving a rough estimate on resin cost to the other departments.
I know it’s not cost efficient to do so, and I would much prefer to buy for the whole year but I have no say other this.
From my limited experience it can usually add between 20 to 60% of the part volume in support, the type of resin and printing on the build plate or not are the biggest factor for that number.
For the time to ship products, maybe having something taking into account your actual machine usage could help ?
For example : if your dashboard know that the FDM machines are full for two weeks and the SLA ones are occupied for 3.5 days that can change the estimation on the client side.