In an interview Aleksander Ciszek from 3YOURMIND talks about the ACAM Community

Aleksander Ciszek, CEO of 3YOURMIND, gave us an interview about the decision to become a member at ACAM Aachen Center for Additive Manufacturing.

What motivated you to become a member of the Aachen Center for Additive Manufacturing?

Since beginning work on our Agile MES in 2018, we have seen an increase in importance of managing and tracking data in both automatic and manual workflow steps. ACAM is a leading center for the development and qualification of the AM processing chain. The meetings, seminars, and research opportunities from ACAM are crucial to understanding the details of these processes as well as to craft our software to match those needs.
When we look at the role that software will play in data collection, planning, and order distribution, it’s important that we build the right information into our software from the beginning. ACAM has many years of experience in establishing benchmark production projects within critical industries like aerospace and automotive. These are important insights – particularly for shared customers – that will be built into our software.

What specific contribution do you make in the field of Additive Manufacturing?

3YOURMIND builds software to automate AM workflows. When we began five years ago, we were one of the first companies who saw that AM was growing to a size that needed horizontal automation in addition to the prototyping optimization being done by companies like Materialise and Autodesk. We began by automating industrial order management, but now we offer a full suite of software to cover each stage of the additive processing stream. The Agile PLM analyzes historical part data or use cases from employees to build a digital inventory of AM-ready parts. The Agile ERP automates AM pricing, production recommendations, and routine business processes related to ordering management. The Agile MES optimizes scheduling, transparency, and quality assurance tracking along the AM production chain.

Which AM technologies have you been pursuing lately?

Most recently, 3YOURMIND has focused on developing standardized machine connectivity between leading machine venders and our Agile MES. As production continues to scale, getting the real-time data into a single software overview plays a big role in efficiency and tracking. More importantly, the production data from multiple machine vendors is being translated into umati, a modern standard that systemizes data input from production and post-processing systems, accounts for manual production steps, and sends as well as receives data. We’re currently focusing on increasing the number of vendor connections, and this is laying a strong foundation for automation and agile manufacturing.

In what way is the partnership at ACAM beneficial for your company? What do you want to achieve with it?

Working with ACAM gives us the opportunity to strengthen our connections with the research community. There is a wealth of knowledge in the organization, and we want to bring this to our product owners and business development teams. The insights we glean from our peers and fellow ACAM members will be critical for the shaping and ongoing development of our software.

How will the cooperation between your company and ACAM look in the future?

In the coming years, we hope to enter into joint research projects to define methods and data streams in our software – this will facilitate faster, more reliable AM production. Our experience in the umati working group showed us how critical it is to get input from hardware and software vendors to best serve automation-focused use cases – especially at the beginning of a project. As an industry, we still have several hurdles to overcome in order to make AM more cost-competitive. These types of partnerships are an important tool to systemize AM.