Manuven is a new organization offering “qualification as a service”.
Parts can be 3D printed on almost any 3D printer, but that isn’t quite what the industry needs. Production parts have to be “qualified”. That means you must have proved that a part, or a class of parts, can consistently meet its required performance, quality, and regulatory requirements when made by a specific process.
This is hard to achieve, and requires considerable work. But it might be a bit easier with a new startup called Manuven. It seems to be a spinout from Authentise, which provides online workflow services for additive manufacturing operations. Evidently, the crew at Authentise saw how companies should be using their services and decided to put it all together into an easier-to-use platform.
Authentise CEO Andre Wegner said on LinkedIn:
“The thing is, Manuven didn’t come from a strategy deck, a market study or one of those diagrams consultants charge a fortune to draw. It came from repeatedly discovering that a surprising amount of manufacturing runs on a surprisingly fragile operating model.”
What does Manuven do, exactly? They list these functions:
- Digitize and Understand: AI extracts geometry and machining recipes from drawings, scans, and text, continuously shared with the team.
- Optimize and Plan: ML suggests modern materials, DFAM redesigns, and build plans with qualification steps baked in.
- Deliver and Deploy: Auto-drafted TDPs, traceability, and routing to vetted suppliers for production anywhere.
Here’s their process in a diagram:
Manuven listed a case study with one client, the USAF/NASA NFAC, which operates the world’s largest wind tunnel. Evidently, the tunnel required new turbine blades, and they used Manuven to organize the work. That’s impressive because this was a large project involving multiple subcontractors. They say that during the project, some 2500 conversations, 200+ documents, and other material were slurped up by Manuven’s AI to provide the base for the outputs. The client apparently experienced significantly improved project management because of Manuven.
While this service isn’t a 3D printer, it is of particular interest to me as it unlocks more additive activity. By organizing large projects more efficiently, the costs of producing parts using AM tools should be lowered and also sped up. That can only be good news for the technology in industry, which at times has struggled to adopt additive workflows.
At this point, Manuven is still quite new, so it should be interesting to see how it is accepted by industry.
