Read Ricoh's story and discover how Authentise have provided the core industrial engineering and workflow management within their production facility.
Challenge
Embracing additive manufacturing and establishing an agile industrial engineering and manufacturing network specific to AM. They also aimed to obtain FDA clearance for their medical models.
Solution
Ricoh partnered with Authentise, who provided an agile platform (FlowsAM) for industrial engineering and manufacturing, based on modern ideas of distributed, contextual data. The platform integrated data, processes, and tools, enabling better understanding, compliance, and quality control.
Results
Ricoh successfully transitioned to an agile manufacturing environment, capitalized on additive manufacturing opportunities, and obtained FDA clearance for their medical models, leading to breakthroughs in healthcare offerings.
Defining cutting edge manufacturing
End to End Workflow
For us, at Authentise, Ricoh are doing more than just simply providing customers with some ultra cool 3D printing facilities. Ricoh are at the forefront of a fundamental shift in manufacturing.
As many realise additive manufacturing provides the manufacturing industry with a significant opportunity for change. However to realise it we need to embrace the wider context. There’s no point driving the world’s fastest and most efficient manufacturing operations, if those operations are surrounded by traditional processes.
Ricoh realised this early on, surrounding their efforts for our contextual data platform (AMES) with a range of dynamic, agile, processes and tools that aim to maximise the possibilities of additive manufacturing for manufacturers. Powered with today’s IT technologies those processes are capable of moving faster than ever before. This is why Ricoh USA chose to work with Authentise.
Authentise helps Ricoh establish an agile, distributed, network for industrial engineering & manufacturing
Assuming we don’t want to go back to Hephaestus (blacksmith to the gods at Olympus) the processes that dominate today’s traditional manufacturing activities were, for the most part, conceived around ideas of mass production and quality from WWII. Names like Ford, Toyota, Drucker, Deming, Cooper and others abound. The stage gate process, which dominates US manufacturing, has some of it’s roots in the late 60s. All ground breaking stuff, that still has massive relevance today.
However, more recently, we’ve undergone some huge changes as a result of digitization. Today, ideas of agile, CI/CD, scrums, stand up meetings, established in the coding & development world are now the norm. In manufacturing it’s clearly time to review our processes.
The idea that we can digitise reality is yielding intense benefits and igniting a common imagination across a wide array of design, engineering & scientific disciplines. Nowhere is this more true than with engineering and manufacturing operations.
A key feature of this “new world” is the ability to flexibly adapt to customers’ needs and tie them, digitally, to the myriad of manufacturing workflows, tasks, resources, people and tools that represent most manufacturing environments… a contextual digital thread!
To help enterprises take advantage of emerging opportunities without trying to force standard IT systems on every business unit, we developed an agile platform (AMES) for industrial engineering and manufacturing.
Based on modern ideas of distributed, contextual data, the Authentise platform integrates data, information and processes across a wide array of enterprise applications (such as LMS, PLM, ERP, SCM, MES, MRP), point specific tools on customers’ workflow (such as CAD, CAM, CAE) and a simple bridge to other innovative 3rd party algorithms and mash up tools (such as customer specific analytics, or AI/ML routines).
By providing a system that can easily incorporate these traditional islands into some context, we can start to gain a better understanding of how disparate pieces of information across our customers’ processes relate to each other. We can start to link processes together. We can start to drive execution and ensure compliance & quality. We can better iterate and understand how we’re doing. We can improve… and we can do it at an agile pace, more in tune with what customers want.
Forged in some of the most agile operations, we’ve learned that modern workflow systems can yield valuable contextual (machine) data, enable agile operations at high efficiency and provide access to innovative, unbundled algorithms.
"At Authentise we’re extremely proud of the efforts Ricoh have undertaken. In addition to providing a key backbone for the agile environment Ricoh need, the Authentise contextual data platform enables data, and processes to be brought together, enabling quality control and, critically, FDA compliance"
Andre Wegner - Authentise CEO
What's Next...
New Frontiers for Ricoh
Ricoh are also expanding their capabilities, providing ground breaking solutions in the FDA realm. Having a viable business strategy supported by technology was key here which is where Authentise came in.
Our software validation tools enabled Ricoh to use their technology as a medical device system thus helping them take a significant step forward obtaining 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its craniomaxillofacial (CMF) and orthopaedic patient-specific anatomic modelling. (Recieved in June 2012)
Building on their already rich experiences, and further integrating other advanced technologies for imaging, and more, Ricoh and their network are able to provide widespread access to patient-specific, additively manufactured, models. Practically this means that manufactured items are matched to the unique anatomy of each individual patient. What’s more healthcare providers can select an on-demand option where they order and have customer specific models printed at a Ricoh facility and shipped directly to them.
Authentise arranged a highly integrated set of systems that enabled them to interact with Ricoh's systems bringing data, and processes together, enabling quality control and, critically, FDA compliance.
“Ricoh is committed to healthcare innovation that will turn the tide on patient engagement and precision medicine. RICOH 3D for Healthcare does just that—offering a model matched to the unique anatomy of each individual patient,” said Gary Turner, Managing Director, Additive Manufacturing, North America, Ricoh USA, Inc.
Ricoh’s efforts have not gone unnoticed by their peers. Prior to their FDA clearance Ricoh announced it had won the 2022 MedTech Breakthrough Award for "Best New Technology Solution for Orthopedics" for RICOH 3D for Healthcare, an integrated end-to-end workflow solution that designs and produces 3D-printed anatomic models for patient-specific representations of tissue and bone.