The Power of Additive to the Consumer

– Hi, everybody, this is Adam Penna. I’m sitting here in the Twikit Booth, and I am talking to Anthony Graves from HP, and Gijs Hoppenbrouwers from Twikit. Hello, how are you gentlemen doing today?

– Excellent.

– I know you’re here with Twikit. You have something in your hand. Let’s explain a little bit about what’s going on. What do you have here in your hand?

– Well, so what we did was through this development of technology and solutions, we also created a number of very strategic and important partnerships, and one of those is with Twikit, who I’ll introduce Gijs here in a second. And those partnerships have manifested in real world use cases to help show customers of our print systems and other print systems. What’s possible when you take a look at the personalization and customization opportunities that exist because of additive manufacturing.

– Yeah, personalization and customization is very big, so it’s good to see this moving forward. Yes, so Gijs, talk a little bit more about that partnership and what’s happening there.

– Like Anthony says, it was a lot of prototyping back then. The power of additive to the consumer. What can we do? What can we do to bring that value to the consumers? And of course, you need a front end, that’s that’s for sure. How you interface with customers in digital front ends, but on the other hand, you need to bring a value.

– [Adam] Yeah.

– What makes sense for a customer? I mean, an injection molded part versus a unique part. So it has to be a unique part. So interface unique part and then manufacturing, of course, but remember eight years ago, technologies were not really ready to bring, let’s say the quality of a prototype part parts to a final product for a customer. So that’s like eight years ago, five years ago, two years ago. And then when we started talking about, let’s say two years ago, and now within this last year, we had a great, great partnership going forward. We see things changing. So finally the vision of having the power of additive and bringing the volumes to additive true consumers is finally there.

– Yes.

– We do this is in consumer products like this one, in automotive, but also in medical, imagine that the insoles, the helmets, the braces, and as an Anthony says, we have realized getting real-life cases. You can discover them here in the booth, but I mean, it’s happening now. And it’s only happening by connecting all the dots.

– So this is the reality of customization and personalization being on-demand, right? That’s what we’re looking at.

– Exactly.

– So talk a little bit about that and how you can pushing that forward.

– Yeah, so we flipped the way people buy and choose products basically. Because it used to be like, oh, is it available? I can buy. With a Twikit system connected to digital manufacturing is the different way. It’s like, I want it. Can you make it? So, so it’s flipping, it’s flipping it. And so that’s what we do. So it’s a new paradigm of consumerism, more sustainable, more efficient as Anthony mentioned, it can be localized. So yeah, that’s on a broader scale what we are doing.

– Yeah. It’s very important. I know Anthony, you’re doing a lot to develop software in the industry for a lot of partners. So to see this next application come out and grow and to be actually put out there in the market, talk about like where that’s going away, the way you see things going.

– Sure. So one of the interesting things, as I mentioned earlier about this maturity in technology and that’s not just print systems, but it’s also the material science that has essentially contributed to this explosion in materials available for additive manufacturing and new processes and devices being created to take advantage of those new materials. So, very interesting, but there’s been a maturity, I think, in the software space too. So in the CAD/CAM world, your big players, your Siemens, PTC, Deso, Autodesk, and some of the smaller players that are out there, they realize that design for manufacturing also has to take in some of the unique requirements that additive manufacturing brings to the table. And so, which is interesting because that’s a marriage between your regular CAD data and then customized on the fly CAD data. Do you want to say something about that?

– I think I support the point you make. So you have a CAD system which was traditionally designed for CNC or injection molding or all those things. And it used to be that people were thinking, oh, we can utilize that and just send it to a printer. And that’s more your domain, I know, but we were confronted by that, as well. So when we started out, we need to find a way to have this geometry generation, which we do in our own girdle, in the clouds, being prepped for the additive flow, right? So we were born in the cloud with our system and we started from additive. We didn’t move to additive.

– [Adam] Wow, okay.

– And this is where we found our click. Like Anthony is dreaming additive, but he knows about the former technologies a lot. So we skip the former and we dream together about.

– Yeah, the solution for additive manufacturing. It is well, Anthony and Gijs, thank you very much for joining us here today. I’m very excited to see what’s next between HP and Twikit. So thank you very much. Alright guys.

– Thank you.

– Take care.

– Cheers.

– Cheers.

– Bye.