DiManEx speeds up part identification for Additive Manufacturing with Werk24’s Additive Analysis solution
8-10K
Processed Drawings/Month
91%
Cycle Time Reduction
80-85%
Automation Rate
Who is DiManEx?
Founded in 2016, the Dutch company DiManEx provides solutions for the complex, inefficient, and disrupted manufacturing supply chains by using additive manufacturing. The signature product is the “End to End Supply Chain Platform” for the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), industrial component distributors, and parts-intensive firms in the automotive, household equipment, and heavy industry sectors.
Using Additive Manufacturing, DiManEx offers supply chain professionals an extremely convenient way of analyzing parts and supply chain data to select and source parts that are suitable for 3D printing. Within their broad supplier network, DiManEx meets the specification demands with local production and supply solutions they offer especially to customers with a global footprint that face supply chain problems.
Industry - Additive Manufacturing
Headquarter - Utrecht, Netherlands
Product - Additive Analysis
“If you have 10 technical drawings, you can easily do it yourself, but we are talking about thousands of drawings. And, if you must go through them, manual work could take months. Now with Werk24, it is done in a couple of days or even hours!”
— Henk Jonker, DiManEx Co-Founder
Challenge
Automatically identify parts for Additive Manufacturing based on Technical Drawings while minimizing errors and maximizing time efficiency to conduct a comprehensive 3D manufacturing supply chain analysis.
Outcome
DiManEx significantly decreased the time required to process a Technical Drawing. Their cycle time decreased by 91%, and their automation rate increased by 80-85%. Now DiManEx speeds up part identification.
Challenge Accepted
DiManEx approached Werk24 with a clear challenge: their OEM customers have thousands to millions of parts; DiManEx developed a method to quickly select those parts that are suited for 3D printing on both the technical as well as supply chain criteria. DiManEx’s method requires technical data input incl. part tolerance, dimensions and material type. The initial solution was to extract data from the customers' PLM, ERM or logistic systems; but this solution was ineffective, because the data in many of these systems is incomplete, insufficient or erroneous.
Technical Drawings are a more robust source of information. The drawings are the source of truth in the manufacturing processes and checked with every procurement step. DiManEx faced the challenge, that the information on technical drawings is “imprisoned” on the drawings and not easily accessible through an API. Werk24 accepted the challenge!
DiManEx chose Werk24 as their data extraction service, because they required an automated and scalable service. A service that offers better solutions to extract information from drawings, enabling a complete supply chain analysis by which customers can quickly identify and select parts for additive manufacturing.
Challenge Completed
After accepting the challenge, Werk24 was integrated into the data exchange flow between DiManEx and their customers. DiManEx sends Werk24 a batch of technical drawings and swiftly receives the extracted information before returning that data to the customer for their portfolio management and using that data for DiManEx’ parts printability assessment.
According to Henk Jonker, Co-Founder at DiManEX, they processed a total of 8’000 drawings in May, and are working towards a constant inflow of 10’000 drawings per month.
Is Werk24 a 100% solution for all types of drawings?
Werk24 is the perfect solution for about 80-85% of the files that are close enough to a ‘standard drawing’. The remaining 15-20% of files are unique in their own ways, and it is always a balancing act of deciding whether to handle a specific situation. Here, DiManEx benefits from Werk24’s ability to flag files for a manual check when an unfamiliar feature was detected.
Long-Term Collaboration
The challenge is completed but the story is not over yet! When asked what’s next for DiManEx and Werk24, DiManEx is very certain for a long-lasting collaboration in the future.
“ Yes, we certainly will continue. The next step is to explore it more with our customers and strengthen the integration.”
— Henk Jonker
Benefits
Digitization and future technologies are massive topics in today's engineering world and many companies want to improve their product solutions with new technologies such as DiManEx. The old processes and methods might no longer be able to keep up with the speed of our changing world. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is one of the old methods which recognizes text in documents and images for data extraction and DiManEx also used OCR for a short period. But OCR itself does not deliver the depth and quality of information and quality as Werk24.
✅ Time Saving
✅ Cost Saving
✅ No Manual Work
✅ New Opportunity
Interested in the solution?
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Additive Analysis
Werk24’s AI checks your entire drawing archive to find parts suitable for Additive Manufacturing. You can integrate this product into your system with our API and easily reduce the inventory costs by 3D printing spare parts on demand.
✅ Key Features
✅ Selection of Additive Technology
✅ Analysis of Outer Dimensions
✅ Analysis of Measures and Tolerances
✅ Analysis of GD&Ts
✅ Analysis of Radii