The Center for Advanced Mineral and Metallurgical Processing (CAMP) and Synesis7 Corporation recently met at a Mile High Innovation Network event in Butte, Montana and the event led to a joint project to develop scalable enhanced 3D printing and “Intelligent Digital Thread” technologies, processes, and operational capabilities. They plan on merging their capabilities in order to help commercial customers and the US Government realize their additive manufacturing, 3D modeling, and intelligent digital thread objectives.
Pam Haxby-Cote, Regional Director of the Blackstone Launchpad Program, is thrilled about bringing Synesis7 and Montana Tech CAMP together at the very first Innovation Network event in Butte, she says “The Mile High Innovation Network is a group of motivated local entrepreneurs coming together once a month to talk about their ventures, opportunities, problems, and successes. These valuable organic networking events are laying the foundation for a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem by creating new ventures, leads and partnerships right here in Butte!”
With this partnership, and the combination of Synesis7 and Montana Tech CAMP, the digital thread process and 3D printing will continue to develop and most likely will make the whole process more flexible and integrated. Everything will come together: operational framework, data, and the technology itself.
The CEO of Synesis7, Allen Ellmaker says, “This team brings a holistic and highly adaptive planning, development, and integration approach. It’s about bringing together business and operations, process, data, information, knowledge management, technology, people, and organizational cultural change factors needed to advance intelligent manufacturing capabilities. Our initial focus is on integrated Additive Manufacturing process capabilities and the Intelligent Digital Thread Integration Framework that ties it all together. The goal is to create an open, flexible, integrated, and scalable AM process, data, technology, and operational framework solution.”
Through joining forces, these two companies will better position themselves to compete for commercial industry and Department of Defense contracts, and they will lay the foundation for an eventual enterprise-wide business management systems and operations support initiative.
So, what exactly is this Intelligent Thread System? According a recent press release, their combined additive manufacturing capabilities will “eventually tie-in with a Customer’s Enterprise-wide business and operations support and management systems. Integration with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Engineering, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), manufacturing execution systems, logistics and maintenance support information systems, the intelligent Scalable Collaborative Automated Logistics Environment (SCALE)/i3™, and disparate data sources will be orchestrated by an integration, synchronization, and navigation engine – the planned common intelligent Digital Thread ‘Integration Framework’.”
Montana based Synesis7 is renowned for their integrative solutions and services and hope to use this partnership to help assist and improve the way customers use data, information and knowledge to 3D technology. Montana Tech CAMP will be the go to partner for technological innovation, and will help Synesis learn the ropes of Additive Manufacturing. Ronda Coguill, CAMP Materials Scientist says, “Partnering with local industry is a keystone to innovation research. CAMP is fortunate to be working with a dynamic local company like Synesis7 to further our joint research goals.”
