At 2024’s Additive Manufacturing Customers Group (AMUG) Convention in Chicago, Würth Additive Group (WAG) unveiled its Digital Stock Providers (DIS) software program platform, aiming to productize a streamlined means to undertake and deploy AM in a safe, distributed community. Constructing on that momentum, at AMUG 2025, attendees witnessed WAG’s imaginative and prescient for DIS go from minimal viable product (MVP) to an formally launched, first version software program platform, giving everybody within the world AM buyer base the chance to streamline their operations from finish to finish through a division of one of many world’s most skilled and revered industrial conglomerates.
Technician holding a printed half from a resin-based 3D printer. Picture courtesy of Würth Additive Group.
In a convention room on the Chicago Hilton, WAG’s CEO, AJ Strandquist, and the product supervisor for DIS, Victor Kurtz, stood surrounded by racks of security tools, operational 3D printers, and DIS’s signature IoT edge units explaining how DIS has gone from beta-testing to a full launch over the course of the final yr. In accordance with Kurtz, the preliminary rollout at AMUG 2024 was pivotal to that trajectory:
“We had over forty signups to a wait-list for DIS finally yr’s convention, and we took a name with each single one in all of these potential customers, which actually helped us dial in on the worth proposition,” Kurtz stated. “So even when our message this yr surrounding the full-launch is much like what it was final yr once we launched the MVP, we’ve now discovered a bunch of the lacking puzzle items that permit us, to a big extent, to have the ability to reply to what the market is demanding forward of time.”
As Strandquist identified, most of that essential suggestions from customers of the pilot platform associated to how totally different sorts of enterprises merely have totally different units of wants with regards to adopting and utilizing AM to implement distributed manufacturing capabilities:
“There’s a stark distinction between massive enterprises that want role-based entry management, single sign-on, all these huge company issues, and any person who’s operating a Shopify retailer, for example, who’s making an attempt to promote, say, Dungeons and Dragons collectible figurines,” the CEO advised me. “For giant firms, we now have to make the case for a way we may also help them maintain promoting what they’re promoting now with out disrupting their present distribution processes, and exhibit how we will truly improve these processes with a digital paper-trail, diversified suppliers, and many others.
“For the operations run by one or a handful of individuals engaged in e-commerce, we now have to clarify how historical past reveals that prospects usually desire to buy merchandise in an actual market vs. a black or gray market scenario. And we can provide them the identical course of management for his or her functions that we ship for big multinationals.”
Würth’s digital stock companies (DIS) platform presents a safe, scalable technique to retailer and transmit validated half knowledge. Picture courtesy of Würth Additive Group.
Except for the truth that WAG is already embedded into the availability chain of the world’s largest provider of fasteners (to not point out myriad different common industrial items), WAG has illustrated its competencies for dealing with the enterprise of main manufacturers with the assistance of one in all its earliest pilot customers, wind large Vestas. The latter’s lead specialist for AM and superior ideas, Jeremy Haight, was on-site at AMUG, aiding WAG with the launch.
And, whereas DIS is machine-agnostic, WAG additionally has a good partnership with Raise3D — which simply launched its first SLS printer at RAPID + TCT 2025 — an important co-sign from one of many world’s most distinguished AM {hardware} manufacturers. At AMUG, WAG helped Raise3D promote the DF2+ DLP printer, its different new launch, and the primary 3D printer to be absolutely built-in with DIS.
Raise3D’s first SLS system, the RMS220. Picture courtesy of Elevate 3D.
Final September, AM Analysis, 3DPrint.com’s sister model, launched a white paper co-produced with WAG, “At all times in Inventory: Streamlining Stock Administration with Additive Manufacturing,” which could be downloaded right here. The paper explored how firms might rethink their provide chains utilizing digital instruments like AM to chop down on abroad sourcing, cut back dangers, and make stock administration simpler. That was barely greater than six months in the past, making it a bit jarring to appreciate how a lot the world has modified because the white paper was launched — not simply when it comes to WAG’s personal progress however within the broader world provide chain context.
One factor that’s definitely not totally different, although, is that WAG has a strong rationale for why now’s the time for digital stock. Certainly, nearly each main geopolitical occasion that has transpired since final September reinforces the concept that the second has arrived for industrializing the standard and scale of AM-enabled distributed manufacturing, an goal that may’t succeed with out digital stock software program.
The truth is, I don’t assume it’s an excessive amount of to say that the validity of all of the AM trade pleasure related to reshoring’s center-stage function within the present world media discourse will hinge on the success of merchandise like DIS. With that in thoughts, there may be one delicate facet to DIS that I took away from its official launch, which I believe captures precisely what the AM trade wants proper now, to capitalize on what’s animating the prevailing enterprise surroundings.
On the heart of WAG’s convention room base-of-operations at AMUG, there was a desk piled with modest white index-card-sized placards that summed up all the things DIS is promoting. Divided into 4 ranges, from “LEVEL ZERO – DIS ACCESS” to “LEVEL THREE – DIS ENTERPRISE,” all of the companies WAG presents are immediately graspable by any potential buyer, and in a manner that permits all such potential prospects to right away work out which group they fall into.
It might sound too apparent, however that is exactly the form of obviousness — and ease-of-use — that the AM trade has lacked, and it’s the form of adhesive that may congeal a fragmented assortment of loosely-related firms, applied sciences, and companies right into a coherent, thriving trade. In the end, that is how the ideas of transforming a provide chain, or beginning a producing enterprise, get packaged right into a single product. That’s how AM grows previous being merely a bunch of fascinating use circumstances.
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