3YOURMIND to Accelerate Rapid Part Identifier for 3D Printing in Partnership with EOS

3YOURMIND, the US-German software company specializing in digital additive manufacturing (AM) inventories for on-demand production, announced that the company has partnered with EOS North America’s Additive Minds to accelerate 3YOURMIND’s Rapid Part Identifier. Additive Minds is EOS’s global network of AM consultants.

The Rapid Part Identifier screens both 2D and 3D digital files in manufacturers’ parts catalogs to speed up and streamline the process of finding good candidates to be replaced with 3D printed counterparts. By partnering with Additive Minds, 3YOURMIND is taking the process a step further, offering companies that digitize their inventories with the Rapid Part Identifier the opportunity to build comprehensive AM strategies onto that foundation.

Along with the fact that both 3YOURMIND and EOS have offices in Novi, Michigan, the partnership makes sense because EOS collaborated with 3YOURMIND to develop the original version of the Rapid Part Identifier. 3YOURMIND was also one of the earliest companies in the portfolio of AM Ventures, the venture capital fund of EOS’s founder, Dr. Hans Langer.

In a press release about 3YOURMIND’s acceleration of the Rapid Part Identifier through its partnership with EOS, Aleksander Ciszek, 3YOURMIND’s co-founder and CEO, said, “EOS has always been a strong supporter of 3YOURMIND and our vision of streamlined, intuitive [AM] workflows. By collaborating with Additive Minds, we look forward to showcasing to EOS customers how simple [AM] can be when it’s backed by strong part business cases from day one.”

The senior manager of Additive Minds, Fabian Alefeld, said, “We are providing a path for organizations to leave the whiteboard and Excel spreadsheet world by creating a faster, more professional approach to building a digital parts warehouse ready for AM production. We partnered with 3YOURMIND to help unlock AM’s potential by eliminating what historically required months of analysis, and quickly generate business cases for on-demand, highly-engineered applications.”

Speaking of Novi, Michigan, another thing worth mentioning is that’s where the 15th Annual Ground Vehicle Systems (GVS) Engineering & Technology Symposium was recently held. That event is where Eric Wetzel from the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) said that the US Army is “looking for more use cases” and “looking for manufacturing partners”, in order to “expand consideration to other parts” for 3D printing potential on the back of the ARL’s initial success with printing battery brackets for Humvees.

3YOURMIND would certainly be one qualified partner, among other reasons because the company recently extended its Digital Manufacturing Data Vault (DMDV) partnership with the US Marines via a $2.5 million contract, for a project the company has been working on with Phillips Corporation’s Federal Division. It would make sense for the Marines and the Army, at least, to ultimately share a database in this context, as automotive parts are a key overlapping part of both branches’ advanced manufacturing initiatives.

In terms of strategic priority concerning the AM sector as a whole, and particularly in a military context, the issues of cybersecurity and general reliability of the cloud will likely have to be the first area where uncertainty must be lessened to whatever extent possible, before any organization and especially the military will be willing to scale-up the rest of its AM program. Thus, the fact that 3YOURMIND has already been working on this with the marines for over a year means the company has a significant head start over any newcomers in this sure-to-be lucrative niche of the AM sector.

Images courtesy of 3YOURMIND