The Société nationale des chemins de fer français (SNCF) – France’s national state-owned railway company – has selected 3YOURMIND to manage its digital qualified inventory and to streamline part identification for additive manufacturing.
SNCF operates over 32,000 km of rail route and runs over 14,000 trains daily. Such a crucial part of France’s infrastructure cannot afford costly delays in parts location or production.
As seen in the railway industry, several parts might be obsolete and might need replacement. AM has increasingly become a production candidate to address this issue. The thing is, identifying if an obsolete or/and a spare part needs to be manufactured can create costly delays.
Not to mention that it can easily become expensive to warehouse these spare parts. Furthermore, a lack of technical information, such as poor 3D drawings and messy ERP data for spare parts, can only contribute to preventable delays and redundancies.
With Manufacturing Execution System (MES) software provider 3YOURMIND on board, SNCF will benefit from a Digital Qualified Inventory. To this end, a standardized process for Identification, Evaluation and Digital part storage has been created to this end.
3YOURMIND’s MES software delivers the flexibility and the data granularity required by Additive Manufacturing.
The software takes into account parameters such as 3D files, weight, material, tolerance, cost of the part, recurrence of use, and order constraints, is highly customizable, and allows the technical and economic specificities of each customer to be taken into account.
In this specific case, the AM part identifier functionalities and Digital Inventory will be leveraged to identify and qualify AM parts according to the right Material & Process. This module enables the customer to digitally spread AM knowledge within the organization.
SNCF can deploy this tool for regular parts monitoring, and will be able to easily supply its digital qualified inventory with parts for additive manufacturing.
The company plans to switch 100 references a year from conventional sourcing to additive manufacturing over the next three years, Laetitia Kirschner, AM leader at SNCF, said.
“This improved ability for inventory analysis and use case screening will help enhance our cost saving and shorten our lead times dramatically,” she added. “We are thrilled to partner with 3YOURMIND and reap the full benefits of additive manufacturing.”
In terms of results, 3YOURMIND’s platform was able to:
- Identify 10,3% of relevant AM parts over 30K+ spare parts
- Reduce their AM average part delivery time by 85% (10 days instead of 2.5 months)
- Save a considerable amount of money
“We at 3YOURMIND believe that in order to scale up and industrialize additive manufacturing, we need to find massive use cases,” Stephan Kühr, CEO at 3YOURMIND said. “Our digital qualified inventory allows SNCF to employ AM in such a use case, and will help revolutionize one of the cornerstone transportation industries in France.”
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