3YOURMIND Shares Industry Vision for On-Demand Manufacturing

CEO and co-founder Aleksander Ciszek discusses current issues impacting manufacturing industries and how 3YOURMIND's on-demand manufacturing platform can enable companies to access parts faster and develop more resilient supply chains.

Today, up to 50% of total manufacturing costs go toward maintaining legacy fleets and equipment. In addition, when a part breaks down, it can take up to two years to cast and re-tool new parts, which requires companies to maintain extensive part inventories to avoid delays.

After eight years on the market, 3YOURMIND is expanding its product scope to include advanced technologies outside of additive manufacturing to support on-demand parts manufacturing industries.

We've already implemented this approach with over 80 companies allowing them to increase supply chain resilience and decrease storage costs.

The Problem Manufacturing Industries Currently Face

For some industries, failure is not an option. In the face of obstacles and setbacks, industries like transportation, energy, and defense do not have the opportunity to rest on their laurels. Instead, these industries must forge ahead and find new solutions that enable them to serve the individuals, communities, and nations who rely on them to deliver services without interruption.

One of the most critical issues these industries face today is operational downtime due to equipment failure and maintenance. For example, transportation delays due to equipment maintenance can prevent goods from arriving at their destination, raising costs for consumers at home to buy essential goods like food and clothing. Similarly, reduced energy output due to parts shortages prevents equipment repair increasing the cost of fuel to heat homes and fill vehicle gas tanks – which not only hurts consumer wallets but has the power to sway political opinion. Finally, the lack of manufacturers to produce critical maintenance parts for obsolete and legacy equipment can impact national security if defense fleets are not wartime-ready, delaying deployment in matters of vital significance.

It is paramount for each of these industries to utilize all available methods to avoid operational downtime, minimize revenue loss, and avoid significant breakdowns to essential infrastructure. For many of these industries, the equipment companies use today was built to last a lifetime. But, unfortunately, parts (and part manufacturers) were not. Because of this, maintaining and sustaining legacy fleets 30 to 50 years old is challenging; technology changes, parts become obsolete, and suppliers are no longer in business.

Sourcing suppliers to manufacture new parts for old equipment is possible but inefficient. Remanufacturing obsolete parts take time it can take two years to re-engineer, cast, and tool parts for legacy equipment. For industries that provide essential services, any service delay is too long. In addition, producing small series parts is not cost-effective for manufacturers, often requiring high-volume orders for slow-moving parts. As a result, original equipment manufacturers foot the bill on warehousing costs for critical parts used infrequently.

That's where 3YOURMIND comes into play.

Empowering Industries to Identify and Produce Parts on Demand

3YOURMIND is an on-demand manufacturing software that empowers manufacturing supply chains to identify and produce parts when and where they're needed most.

Using the 3YOURMIND platform, OEMs, operating companies, and contract manufacturers can create digital inventories of spare parts that reduce costs, shorten production lead times, and secure more efficient and agile operations. Although 3YOURMIND primarily focuses on assisting customers in producing spare parts, we also enable them to use advanced manufacturing technologies to make new parts faster, lighter, and with better performance.

The 3YOURMIND platform analyzes new and existing parts designs to identify on-demand manufacturing opportunities based on financial and advanced manufacturing technology factors. After identifying parts suitable for on-demand manufacturing, customers can build digital inventories of qualified parts, enabling them to order parts, request price quotes, and manage production capabilities with internal and external suppliers in just a few clicks.

In addition, customers gain access to a connected digital information thread by capturing critical data inputs from part identification through part production. With this, customers can leverage data to improve part design and performance, replicate and certify quality construction, and make data-driven decisions using the platform's Lifecycle Analytics dashboard.

By using the 3YOURMIND platform, customers gain access to a full-service on-demand manufacturing solution that empowers companies to:

• Find the best business cases for on-demand manufacturing to begin producing high-value parts quickly and with less lead time.
  
  
• Qualify parts faster and make informed decisions based on material and technology suggestions suitable for on-demand manufacturing.
  
  
• Build digital inventories that enable customers to view, order, and distribute parts to internal and external suppliers with real-time pricing.
  
  
• Manage production with quality management functionalities, including machine connectivity and quality reports to guarantee consistent, replicable part quality.

SNCF Reduces Production Lead Time From Months to Days With 3YOURMIND

As a fundamental French transportation service provider, SNCF needed a solution to produce maintenance and repair spare parts quickly, efficiently, and at low manufacturing costs while avoiding purchasing and storing overstock parts.

SNCF required an on-demand manufacturing solution that would address its challenges, including:

• Inflated warehousing costs due to obsolete and slowly rotating part storage.
• Long delivery timelines result in operational downtime and unnecessary revenue loss.
• Difficulty gathering critical part information due to distributed or inconsistent spare part information. 

SNCF leveraged 3YOURMIND's on-demand manufacturing solution to develop a centralized top-down and bottom-up approach to part qualification. From a top-down perspective, supply chain managers can evaluate their current parts databases and see which should be moved from the physical to the digital warehouse.

With the bottom-up approach, AM engineers across multiple maintenance and repair centers can use the 3YOURMIND platform to automatically evaluate new parts, prototypes, tooling, and spare parts for on-demand production. Supply chain managers can receive part requests from maintenance operators and search them within the part database. Then, supply chain managers can request engineers to evaluate and qualify the part for on-demand manufacturing.

An overview of the SNCF platform on 3YOURMIND.

As a result, SNCF:

• Decreased average lead time for conventionally manufactured parts from 5 months to 10 days using on-demand manufacturing, getting equipment back into operation faster.
  
  
• Established a digital database with more than 70,000 searchable parts, enabling SNCF to locate and order qualified parts for on-demand manufacturing.
  
  
• Discovered more than 8500 AM-suitable parts with substantial economic value, resulting in lower costs and greater return on investment.
  
  
• Identified on-demand use cases with cost savings projected to generate a $20.3M return on investment.

Your Parts, One Click Away

3YOURMIND is dedicated to developing software solutions that support critical manufacturing industries. Our on-demand manufacturing software addresses the needs of high-level decision-makers by providing dashboard overviews of total manufacturing costs while providing tools to individual users like engineers and supply chain managers to access valuable parts without creating additional processes. With 3YOURMIND, we support manufacturers in managing their internal production capacities and streamline efforts to procure parts with external suppliers. 

3YOURMIND offers one solution for full access to the on-demand manufacturing value chain.

Aleksander Ciszek is CEO and co-founder of 3YOURMIND, a software company that supports organizations scale their on-demand manufacturing operations. He works directly with leading OEMs to integrate smart manufacturing processes into their organizations. Since 2014, Aleksander has grown the company to include offices in Europe and the United States and has closed 3YOURMIND's series A funding round. In 2018, Aleksander was recognized in Forbes' “30 Under 30 Europe” list.

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