By David BASSETTI, founder and CEO, Bassetti Group

Digitalization is key!

David Bassetti

One of the key challenges for the industry in 2024 will continue to be the indispensable digitalization of all production and business processes. The steady advance of Industry 4.0, in which the intelligent interconnectivity of machines, processes and data becomes part of everyday life, will be a pivotal factor for competitiveness. Companies that miss out on this transformation run the real risk of being left behind. At the same time, they must also meet a growing and increasingly complex number of regulatory and environmental requirements. Without investing in new technologies that guarantee complete documentation and traceability, it is almost impossible to comply with all the existing and upcoming e.g. quality requirements or ISO standards. In relation to the technological changeover, there is also the increasingly decisive factor of making know-how and implicit knowledge of high added value usable and accessible, especially for industrial companies that are heavily dependent on skilled workers. Here, from a digital perspective, an openness to restructuring must also be established so that key issues, such as the increasing need to automate processes, can progress and a focus on the company’s core competencies can be retained. The main challenge here is to find a balance between human expertise and automated processes. The integration of artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data analyses can and will make a major contribution to this allowing well-founded decisions to be made and realize efficiency gains.

Personally, I am firmly convinced that whether it’s in times of crisis (to save costs and focus on value-adding activities) or economic upswing (to promote innovation and remain competitive) – the digitalization of processes and the management of technical and tacit knowledge will be the key to every industrial company.

In order to meet this persistently growing demand for digital transformation, we at BASSETTI are pursuing a comprehensive growth strategy in the new year, which is paired with major investments in product and tool innovations.

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By AlphaStar Team

The year 2023 has passed and we are in the New Year. Before we make predictions, it may be helpful to make requests. Let us hope 2024 is a time of peace.  Let us remember how much we need each other and how much we can accomplish together.  Peace may be difficult; but it is also necessary for the progress we all desire.

Let us remain positive.  Thankfully that means getting down to business and engineering.  Fortunately, technology, like people, marches on and 2024 should be a banner year.

New Roles and Applications for Polymer Additive Manufacturing (AM),

Polymer AM has always been the little engine that could.  From rapid prototyping to hobbyist to complex geometry, it has pioneered growth in AM.  Yet it always seems it is in a relay race with AM metal.  Thank you polymer, now pass the baton to AM metal for the real breakthroughs. Fortunately, what we have are two heavy stems of a strong and robust tree.  Explorations in new fibers, continuous fibers, chopped fibers, inclusions, particulates, resins, multi-materials, curing and fabrication technologies have amplified the capabilities of this venerable science.  Improvements in strength, stiffness, performance in elevated temperatures mean polymer AM can take on challenges that seemed impossible ten years ago.  Light weighting, selective critical components, and massive scaled fabrication are all within the crosshairs.  Polymer AM is ripe for reasserting its place as a major contributor to AM expansion and development. It should be noted that AlphaSTAR’s ICME based GENOA 3DP toolset provides virtual process simulation and build optimization for polymer AM parts.  The tool can also assess the durability and damage tolerance of the virtual as build part in response to service loads.

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By Alex Hussain, the Co-Founder & CEO of 3DChimera

Alex Hussain

Additive Manufacturing in 2024 – Predicting a Course Through Market Correction to Innovation

For anyone that follows the stock market closely, the Additive Manufacturing Industry has been top of mind…but not for the reasons that the rest of us might have guessed based on the headlines of years past.  By the end of 2023, virtually every publicly traded company in the additive manufacturing industry was significantly down, with some of the major players facing difficult decisions on what the future may hold.  The root cause of these declines has been varied and unclear, ranging from a general market slowdown in capital equipment purchases to the consequences of overly aggressive market forecasts and overvaluations.  In 2024, we predict a major market correction with a consolidation of several large players in the industry, and more than one of the publicly traded companies shutting their doors for good.

While this prediction may seem dire, rest assured, the additive manufacturing industry is not going anywhere.  In fact, while growth has slowed in the stock market, many of the smaller players in the industry are thriving.  New entrants to the market, with disruptive price points and capabilities, are expanding the promise of additive manufacturing to more companies than ever before.  Additive manufacturing tools are no longer only for huge companies with giant budgets.  At the end of 2023, 3DChimera saw a huge surge of business from small and medium sized companies looking to add equipment and capabilities, taking advantage of a short window of opportunity where their competitors took pause due to corporate budget freezes.  We predict these trends will continue into 2024, and that the smaller businesses adopting additive manufacturing will begin to lead in their respective markets by unleashing the potential of this transformative technology. Additive manufacturing is a perfect tool for our time, allowing companies to leverage technology to accomplish more with less investment and fixed costs than has been required in years past.

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By  Theo Saville, CEO, CloudNC

Theo Saville

 The main manufacturing tech trend for 2024: what happens when you start applying generative AI to physical problems.

For example… what if you could create anything you wanted – at the touch of a button?

It’s a dream of humanity, rendered (and parodied) ad nauseum in science-fiction, from Star Trek to Iron Man to Red Dwarf – that with a single click, a smart computer could create whatever you need: from hot drinks and food, to a super-powerful exoskeleton – and everything in between.

We are, of course, still some distance from any such vision becoming a reality. But recent advances in generative AI mean we aren’t quite as far away as we think.

Artificial intelligence tools like Chat-GPT and DALL-E can create new words, images and video, based on only a few inputs. The results can range from the curious (such as new AI-generated episodes of the Simpsons) to the scary (like Bing’s AI telling a NYT reporter in a chat that it wants to be alive), to the pretty funny (and genuinely impressive).

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