Supply-side automation and component diversification of Plyable's online manufacturing marketplace: efficient and agile CNC manufacturing

Virtually everything that is manufactured requires CNC machining at some point; more than £80bn worth of components are produced every year. While modern processes like 3D printing have enabled rapid prototyping and spurred innovation, the real business of manufacturing relies ondecades-old spreadsheets, late-night phone calls and hand-wringing, making the process slow and incredibly inefficient. As a result, CNC-machined components are time-consuming and expensive to make, requiring experts in design, tooling and manufacture to work together to produce a final product. Nowhere is this more true than in composites manufacturing, where a significant amount of time and 40--60% of upfront cost for a part is in tooling design and manufacture.Plyable recognised that there is a large amount of underutilised capital assets in the high-performance/low-volume manufacturing industry and the business model aggregates this capacity via a free-to-use online manufacturing platform. Plyable built an automated, instantaneous quote package based on calculated component properties and calculated CNC information which they then incorporated into an existing frontend web interface. Essentially, this brought mould design and manufacture under one roof for the first time with first-of-its-kind digital manufacturing technology to allow immediate pricing and ordering. By maximising machine utilisation and minimising needless human-to-human interactions, a recent study by GKN aerospace demonstrated that, on average, the resulting Plyable process reduces upfront costs by 20% and lead times by 44%.In this project, Plyable will introduce supply-side automation to its business model for the first time, delivering further efficiencies to the benefit of both sides of the marketplace, while simultaneously opening the online platform to non-composite components. The resulting enhanced offering will automatically select and alert potential manufacturers based on product information, aggregating and utilising the capacity of Plyable's vast network of CNC machine shops housing in excess of 1000 CNC machines to allow high-volume production runs; an innovation that leverages existing outsourced CNC machine capability and capacity across the UK that competitors cannot achieve with in-house manufacturing (e.g. protolabs) or by selling autonomous CNC manufacturing hardware (e.g. CloudNC). As a result, the first-of-its-kind industrial digital technology (IDT) developed in this project will tackle the urgent societal need for rapid high-performance/high-volume manufacture of custom CNC-made components that go into life-saving healthcare equipment like the ventilators and CPAP devices being developed by VentilatorChallengeUK, Dyson, Babcock, Science Group, MercedesF1 and many more; thereby supporting efforts to accelerategovernment and private procurement of urgent equipment via domestic supply chains.ADDITONAL INFORMATION –Plyable also sees significant benefit to the manufacturing landscape by allowing access to the supply side network, and in turn their customers, ofthe significant enhancements and efficiency savings that Plyable digital first approach allows. A new product will be created that allows users to be able to run all orders through one system not only orders originated from Plyable customers thereby having access to automation and transparency features on 100% of orders.