Materialise Announces CO-AM Software Platform to Advance Serial AM Production

The Materialise CO-AM software platform builds on more than three decades of 3D printing experience and is an important milestone in the company’s strategy to offer cloud-based access to its entire software suite. The open architecture of the platform lets users integrate all of their preferred tools, allowing customers in major manufacturing industries, including aerospace, automotive, consumer, medical and energy, to always have access to the latest software innovations and to scale their operations based on their current needs. At the same time, CO-AM will provide seamless access to production data, allowing manufacturers to continuously monitor and improve their AM workflows.

Manufacturing companies increasingly turn to AM to produce at scale. Today however, most enterprise users adopt AM for prototyping. AM production still requires a lot of skilled manual intervention and disconnected data makes it hard to achieve the consistent and repeatable quality standards that are needed to mass-produce identical or customized products. By providing access to their preferred software in an open, cloud-based platform, CO-AM will help manufacturers unlock the full power of AM.

At the heart of the CO-AM platform is a data-lake that connects to all production tools and keeps track of what is happening on the production floor. The ability to monitor and analyze production data will enable operators to define and store their own unique workflows in a knowledge database, empowering them to continuously improve the production process. This creates an AI-powered learning platform where every printed part has the potential to be better than the previous one.

To successfully scale their AM operations, manufacturers require an open ecosystem that connects to a wide range of technologies and integrates with existing production infrastructures. The Materialise CO-AM platform presents an open software architecture that provides companies direct access to multiple hardware technologies and their preferred tools from Materialise and other software developers, supporting them along every step of their AM journey – from planning and printing to quality control.

Materialise plans to offer more than 25 software applications on its CO-AM platform, including a seamless integration with Magics; AM Watch for shopfloor data collection, and its Build Processors for connectivity with more than 150 different 3D printing systems. The company will also open the platform to independent software vendors and has already onboarded several third party applications, including AM-Flow and Castor.

Materialise invites AM software vendors to connect their applications to the CO-AM software platform for selected pilot projects. Development partners will get access to the software development kit (SDK), application programming interfaces (APIs), and staging environment, enabling them to natively build proprietary or co-developed solutions within the platform.

Materialise is already working with selected customers and plans to provide broader access to the CO-AM platform over the coming months.

Materialise incorporates three decades of 3D printing experience into a range of software solutions and 3D printing services, which together form the backbone of the 3D printing industry. Materialise’s open and flexible solutions enable players in a wide variety of industries, including healthcare, automotive, aerospace, art and design, and consumer goods, to build innovative 3D printing applications that aim to make the world a better and healthier place. Headquartered in Belgium, with branches worldwide, Materialise combines the largest group of software developers in the industry with one of the largest 3D printing facilities in the world. For additional information, please visit: www.materialise.com.