Professionalizing Business
Since the birth of the industry, 3D printing service bureaus have been conducting their business, and client communications, via email and telephone, which are laborious, tedious and expensive in terms of manpower. Fabnami offers a complete ecosystem to automate and streamline business processes within 3D printing service bureaus and facilities, such as quoting, sales, order and production management, thus increasing a service bureau throughput while dramatically reducing their manpower expenditures.
Fabnami analyzes and quotes tens of thousands of 3D models monthly, driving 3D printing sales in service bureaus such as: 3DPrintUK, 3D Printer Experience, 3DSL, Parts on demand, and many more.
A Growing Trust
How did Fabnami and Materialise meet? Well, five years ago, Benoit Valin founded Prototype Asia: Singapore’s first, and leading regional 3D printing service bureau. Acquired by Silicon Valley’s UCT, Prototype Asia, under the new name of the UCT Additive Manufacturing Center, it grew to become the Southeast-Asian franchisee for i.materialise, making it the largest 3D printing facility in the region and entirely powered by Materialise software solutions.
Well aware of the bottlenecks and difficulties of operating a 3D printing service bureau in an increasingly competitive market, Benoit joined the ranks of Fabnami as its co-founder in 2015, with the aim of capturing his knowledge and know-how of the industry and embodying it by rapidly deploying enterprise 3D printing SaaS for service bureaus to use, grow and gain the competitive edge they need to succeed.
Soon after, Benoit met a second Benoît at Materialise and together they started planning how both platforms could be united best to bring true change in the operation of service bureaus worldwide.
Extended Functionalities
Through the addition of Materialise Cloud’s file conversion and mesh repair functionalities, Fabnami is able to put an end to time-consuming, low-value processes, effectively eliminating unnecessary labor, expensive CAD software and powerful workstations from a service bureau’s business acquisition workflow and technology footprint.
With the Materialise – Fabnami collaboration, service bureaus can save a substantial amount of time thanks to the integrated STL converter that automatically converts up to 33 different file formats to STL, including proprietary formats from CAD softwares such as: Solidworks, Catia, NX, Creo, AutoCAD, Rhino and many more. This extended file format compatibility, from the base 16 formats supported by Materialise Cloud, is a result of this high-value partnership, and Materialise’s ability to truly meet the needs of their partners by delivering a complete solution.
In addition to the STL Converter, Fabnami incorporated Materialise’s mesh repair features, enabling them to instantly fill holes and shrink-wrap self-intersecting models to deliver watertight 3D models to their clients. They were able to do this regardless of the initial file format or the quality of the provided mesh, thereby increasing the quality of their 3D printable content and speeding up the service bureau workflow.
Fabnami will be integrating future Materialise Cloud functionality as their services are made available, to deliver enhanced solutions to 3D printing service bureaus and facilities.
So stay tuned!
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About Fabnami
Since 2013, Fabnami has been offering a comprehensive enterprise 3D printing SaaS that allows 3D printing service bureaus small and large to streamline their daily business and operations. Fabnami owns and develops advanced algorithms for 3D-mesh analysis, support material optimization and accurate 3D-print pricing formulas for a wide range of industrial printers. Check out the FabnamiBot to give Materialise Cloud a spin.
Benoit Valin, cofounder at Fabnami.
