A vital factor contributing to the efficiency and success of Materialise Industrial Services prototyping and low volume production operations is the use of Materialise’s innovative software solutions. Materialise leads the development and provision of integrated software products and services for the RP&M (Rapid Prototyping & Manufacturing) professional. These leading software solutions automate the entire RP&M workflow from the 3D CAD file all the way to the final product, including data management and resource planning

Optimal Efficiency

In order to provide cost-effective solutions with the shortest lead-times in the industry, it is essential that the most efficient software is employed to ensure optimal performance.

Advanced work preparation

In order to provide unique rapid prototyping and manufacturing solutions to our wide range of customers, we need to perform many file operations to adapt or prepare files for building on a rapid prototyping machine. Such operations include automatic file fixing, nesting, cutting of STL files, automatic support generation slicing of STL files, and import of STL files etc. Magics, the professional software solution for rapid prototyping and manufacturing professionals proves to be the ideal solution for these requirements.

Automated design operations

With the World’s largest rapid prototyping capacity in one location, we build many parts on a daily basis. In order to offer this extensive capacity in conjunction with cost-efficiency and the shortest lead-times in the industry, it is imperative that we automate as many operations as possible. That’s why we utilise the e-Tools developed by Materialise’s Software division to automate several steps of the rapid prototyping and manufacturing file preparation stage, for example labelling, nesting, support generation.

Optimal communication, planning, data management and tracability

In our strive for optimal efficiency we have an advanced and customised project and process management software solution in place, known as Magics e-RP. This enables our projects (from initial sales data all the way through to shipment tracking) to be managed and shared on one central system. This facilitates machine and project planning, ensures full part and process tractability. Thanks to the Materialise Software Development Services our Magics e-RP solution is completely tuned to our needs and is fully integrated into our CRM system.

Advanced design modifications

Repair and design changes without reverse engineering

We often have requests from customers to scan an object for which no CAD data exists. The scanning process is often unable to capture all the information to automatically recreate the complete geometry of an object, which subsequently leads to the geometry requiring healing and reconstruction. However, instead of reverse engineering the scan data and taking it back to CAD for repair and design changes, we use 3-matic software to execute repairs and design changes directly on the STL file. This enables us to save significant amounts of time and avoids the errors
associated with reverse engineering back to CAD.