Operational intelligence for additive manufacturing

The Uptimo dashboard continuously monitors your operation, helping you anticipate risks and address inefficiencies before they affect production.

In operations, we need to isolate the signal from the noise. The dashboard algorithms continuously monitor the operations based on lean principles in the four key pillars of production: machines, projects, people and consumables to highlight potential problems. This enables operations to focus on production execution and delivering customer value.

Production requires constant analysis to ensure that it is working at its best: machines need to be running all the time and tasks planned for the future, people in production need to execute on tasks within the time they have during the day, production runs and consumables need to be available and prepared in advance to minimize downtimes. Without Uptimo, this analysis and decision-making is based on tribal knowledge and requires over 40 hours per week across operations. The dashboard solves all of these challenges by anticipating and telling your team exactly what to focus on.

Uptimo replaces hours of tribal-knowledge-based scheduling with a 5-second automated process, powered by a digital twin of your entire operation.

It factors in the production schedule, downstream capacity, production qualifications, variations in machine setup time and steps, project deadlines and even determines material changes that need to be scheduled. And because it takes 5  seconds to schedule, the ideal combination is instantly recalculated and deployed, keeping throughput, efficiency, and team communication aligned in real time.

The analysis module turns data into insights on long-term production performance.

Analytics can be broken down into what we can do to solve the problem; you need to know what happens as production is running to immediately diagnose problems or to understand the big picture and how to change your strategy and assumptions accordingly. In Uptimo, this happens automatically through the review analytics viewed at a daily or weekly interval to determine what’s happened.

Then the discussion gets concrete: The worst builds of the week come up with their full operational context and clear ownership, so the conversation is about what we can do better as a team through regular continuous improvement loops.

These same numbers, aggregated over months answers a different question: what about our strategy going forward? Uptimo’s strategy module supports decisions on long-term profitability by providing you with granular data on the efficiency and margins of your production based on machine types, geometries and materials. With this overview, we can determine the machine hourly rate (MHR) as well as which machines, alloys, or build types are profitable in our organization.

Additionally, Uptimo determines waste patterns such as excessive machine setup times, breakdowns, or rejections.

Uptimo’s inventory automatically tracks powder properties and reduces powder testing.

Uptimo is the only solution that automatically tracks powder according to AMS7031 and ARP7044 standards. This means that your team can focus on operations and executing projects rather than recycling count and powder properties. With an intuitive interface, anybody can utilize powder according to the highest quality aerospace standards with minimal onboarding. This ensures your operations are resilient and scalable.

Powder quality control is kept to a minimum thanks to the intelligence behind Uptimo: laser hours and volume printed are tracked throughout the powder lifecycle and used to assess powder degradation without requiring expensive laboratory tests.

The consumption algorithms inform you when your inventory is running low to anticipate when new powder has to be ordered and give you an overview of everything in stock for planning future work.

Uptimo retains tribal knowledge.

Through the shopfloor module in Uptimo, work execution is simple and intuitive: tasks are sorted in the order they must be performed. Critical information like which powder and the quantity for any given project are displayed, ensuring that engineers are no longer necessary in operational decisions. Machine efficiency, powder aging and other production analytics are automatically calculated.