Gaining Product Record Traceability and Visibility—From Design to the Factory Floor

About the Company

Markforged^® is strengthening manufacturing resiliency by enabling industrial production at the point of need. Their additive manufacturing platform, The Digital Forge™ allows manufacturers to create strong, accurate parts in both metal and advanced composites. With over 10,000 customers in 70+ countries, Markforged delivers on-demand industrial production where it’s needed most. Headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, the company designs the hardware, software, and advanced materials that make The Digital Forge reliable and easy to use.

AT A GLANCE

Mission

Bringing industrial production to the point of need

Best Thing About Arena

The single source of truth where engineering turns to understand the decisions they made, what’s been communicated, and what the CM should be making

Bottom-Line Impact

Achieve substantial cost savings by eliminating late-stage scrap and rework and ensuring CMs are working with accurate BOMs

Key Benefits

Eliminates manual entry of product information into spreadsheets
Supports their journey to reduce ECO cycle time by 25%
Improves traceability and visibility into product serial numbers to quickly identify problem parts
Eliminates building to incorrect revisions by sharing accurate BOMs with CMs
Provides a flexible platform to easily integrate with existing PDM/CAD and future solutions
Helps achieve substantial cost savings by eliminating late-stage scrap and rework

BUSINESS CHALLENGES

The Digital Forge is helping manufacturers and businesses solve complex design and production challenges.

Staying the course to develop advanced 3D printers, Markforged found their existing product development practices were no longer sufficient to keep up with growing product complexities and market demand. In addition, challenges came from managing information in spreadsheets, siloed product data management (PDM) and computer-aided design (CAD) systems, causing the company to experience missed deadlines, scrap, rework, and additional costs.

One critical pain point—managing engineering change orders (ECOs)—proved to be another crucial area that needed attention as teams manually recorded ECOs on spreadsheets and stored them in the Cloud. With the company expanding its product line, the number of ECOs grew, making it increasingly hard to track product changes accurately.

Another significant challenge Markforged faced was the absence of a consolidated bill of materials (BOM) for their products, coupled with inconsistencies between CAD files and what vendors received. To remedy the issue, engineers proactively requested quarterly BOM updates from the contract manufacturers (CMs).

With BOM in hand, an engineer had the laborious task of manually cross-referencing the ECOs for parts while updating the CAD files to match. This process was time-consuming and open to errors; it also impacted the project’s timelines. Jon Bond, Director of Mechanical Design said, “We could get things out the door when we had one or two products, but as our portfolio grew, it was difficult for us to understand what was in the product at the end of the day.”

With their commitment to quality, Markforged quickly recognized the need to improve their systems and processes.

Blue quote mark

Before Arena, there was no definitive source of truth for product information. The source of truth was somewhere between what was in one large folder organized by ECOs, what our CM had, and what we had on hand.”

—Jon Bond, Director of Mechanical Design, Markforged

THE SOLUTION

Markforged knew they needed a solution that would: deliver better performance; extricate them from paper processes; help keep up with demand; streamline the management of part numbers, ECOs, and BOMs; provide traceability; enable real-time collaboration with their CMs; integrate with their PDM/CAD tools; drive faster development with a controlled cloud framework; and ultimately provide the much-needed single source of truth for all their product information.

The company began to explore product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions. After researching several solutions and talking with industry colleagues, the team at Markforged determined Arena PLM was the best solution to meet their needs.

Markforged believed that due to the size of their company and low effort to quickly ramp up, Arena was the perfect fit to help put processes in place. Plus, Arena’s robust PLM capabilities enabled the company to meet all their challenges.

With Arena at the helm, Markforged has been able to move away from spreadsheets and establish a single source of truth for their product record. Now engineering teams know what products are being made, their current revision and serial numbers, and when the product is scheduled for manufacturing. Arena also handles all BOM and change management as well as RoHS compliance and EMC certification.

In the short-term, Arena’s configurability has enabled Markforged to meet their immediate needs. As they continue to evolve their processes, they can seamlessly adjust as they scale. The company is also on the path to reducing their ECO cycle time by 25% with Arena. For the long-term, the company is evaluating their current processes and optimizing them to make sure they’re using Arena as effectively as possible.

As Markforged continues to expand its product portfolio, Arena PLM is an integral part of the business as it evolves, meets demand, and leads the industry.

KEY BENEFITS

By far the most important benefit Arena has provided Markforged is—a single source of truth. Everything that pertains to what’s on the factory floor, from drawings, parts, who should be making the part, critical dimensions, down to the sourcing and supply chain, is all managed within Arena. Jon stated, “Before Arena, there was no definitive source of truth for product information. The source of truth was somewhere between what was in one large folder organized by ECOs, what our CM had, and what we had on hand.”

Since implementing Arena, Markforged has gained much needed traceability of their product record. With Arena’s document management capabilities, engineers can now go back and identify what parts are having problems by tracking their product serial numbers. “Arena has given us traceability in the system. If a customer is having a problem, we’re able to quickly identify the issue. We can look at their serial number and figure out where it fell in the range as well as validate that we made a change to the part that was having problems,” Jon explained.

Arena has made collaboration and communication with CMs more streamlined. Engineers can verify each revision they send to the CMs without confusion about which revision a product was or should be built to. This has saved the company a substantial amount of money by reducing rework and not paying for a product that needs to be scrapped. Jon said, “Having better communication helps us understand what things should be released and ensures our CM has the most accurate information. And, if we’ve made a mistake, we know that too, and hopefully prevent it from happening in the first place.”