At 2024’s Additive Manufacturing Customers Group (AMUG) Convention in Chicago, Würth Additive Group (WAG) unveiled its Digital Stock Providers (DIS) software program platform, aiming to productize a streamlined capacity to undertake and deploy AM in a safe, distributed community. Constructing on that momentum, at AMUG 2025, attendees witnessed WAG’s imaginative and prescient for DIS go from minimal viable product (MVP) to an formally launched, first version software program platform, giving everybody within the world AM buyer base the chance to streamline their operations from finish to finish by way of a division of one of many world’s most skilled and revered industrial conglomerates.
Technician holding a printed half from a resin-based 3D printer. Picture courtesy of Würth Additive Group.
In a convention room on the Chicago Hilton, WAG’s CEO, AJ Strandquist, and the product supervisor for DIS, Victor Kurtz, stood surrounded by racks of security gear, operational 3D printers, and DIS’s signature IoT edge gadgets explaining how DIS has gone from beta-testing to a full launch over the course of the final yr. Based on Kurtz, the preliminary rollout at AMUG 2024 was pivotal to that trajectory:
“We had over forty signups to a wait-list for DIS eventually yr’s convention, and we took a name with each single one in all of these potential customers, which actually helped us dial in on the worth proposition,” Kurtz stated. “So even when our message this yr surrounding the full-launch is much like what it was final yr once we launched the MVP, we’ve now discovered a bunch of the lacking puzzle items that permit us, to a big extent, to have the ability to reply to what the market is demanding forward of time.”
As Strandquist identified, most of that important suggestions from customers of the pilot platform associated to how completely different sorts of enterprises merely have completely different units of wants in terms of adopting and utilizing AM to implement distributed manufacturing capabilities:
“There’s a stark distinction between giant enterprises that want role-based entry management, single sign-on, all these huge company issues, and someone who’s operating a Shopify retailer, as an example, who’s attempting to promote, say, Dungeons and Dragons collectible figurines,” the CEO advised me. “For large corporations, we now have to make the case for a way we may also help them maintain promoting what they’re promoting now with out disrupting their current distribution processes, and reveal how we are able to really improve these processes with a digital paper-trail, diversified suppliers, and many others.
“For the operations run by one or a handful of individuals engaged in e-commerce, we now have to clarify how historical past reveals that prospects typically desire to buy merchandise in an actual market vs. a black or gray market state of affairs. And we can provide them the identical course of management for his or her purposes that we ship for large multinationals.”
Würth’s digital stock providers (DIS) platform affords a safe, scalable technique to retailer and transmit validated half knowledge. Picture courtesy of Würth Additive Group.
Except for the truth that WAG is already embedded into the availability chain of the world’s largest provider of fasteners (to not point out myriad different basic industrial items), WAG has illustrated its competencies for dealing with the enterprise of main manufacturers with the assistance of one in all its earliest pilot customers, wind large Vestas. The latter’s lead specialist for AM and superior ideas, Jeremy Haight, was on-site at AMUG, aiding WAG with the launch.
And, whereas DIS is machine-agnostic, WAG additionally has a decent partnership with Raise3D — which simply launched its first SLS printer at RAPID + TCT 2025 — a vital co-sign from one of many world’s most outstanding AM {hardware} manufacturers. At AMUG, WAG helped Raise3D promote the DF2+ DLP printer, its different new launch, and the primary 3D printer to be totally built-in with DIS.
Raise3D’s first SLS system, the RMS220. Picture courtesy of Increase 3D.
Final September, AM Analysis, 3DPrint.com’s sister model, launched a white paper co-produced with WAG, “All the time in Inventory: Streamlining Stock Administration with Additive Manufacturing,” which will be downloaded right here. The paper explored how corporations may rethink their provide chains utilizing digital instruments like AM to chop down on abroad sourcing, scale back dangers, and make stock administration simpler. That was barely greater than six months in the past, making it a bit jarring to appreciate how a lot the world has modified because the white paper was launched — not simply by way of WAG’s personal progress however within the broader world provide chain context.
One factor that’s actually not completely different, although, is that WAG has a strong rationale for why now could be the time for digital stock. Certainly, nearly each main geopolitical occasion that has transpired since final September reinforces the concept that the second has arrived for industrializing the standard and scale of AM-enabled distributed manufacturing, an goal that may’t succeed with out digital stock software program.
Actually, I don’t assume it’s an excessive amount of to say that the validity of all of the AM business pleasure linked to reshoring’s center-stage function within the present world media discourse will hinge on the success of merchandise like DIS. With that in thoughts, there’s one delicate facet to DIS that I took away from its official launch, which I feel captures precisely what the AM business wants proper now, to capitalize on what’s animating the prevailing enterprise setting.
On the middle of WAG’s convention room base-of-operations at AMUG, there was a desk piled with modest white index-card-sized placards that summed up every little thing DIS is promoting. Divided into 4 ranges, from “LEVEL ZERO – DIS ACCESS” to “LEVEL THREE – DIS ENTERPRISE,” all of the providers WAG affords are immediately graspable by any potential buyer, and in a means that allows all such potential prospects to instantly determine which group they fall into.
It could sound too apparent, however that is exactly the type of obviousness — and ease-of-use — that the AM business has lacked, and it’s the type of adhesive that may congeal a fragmented assortment of loosely-related corporations, applied sciences, and providers right into a coherent, thriving business. In the end, that is how the ideas of transforming a provide chain, or beginning a producing enterprise, get packaged right into a single product. That’s how AM grows previous being merely a bunch of fascinating use circumstances.
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