Sigma Labs Inc (SASI)

[Jackle]

Reading, or more accurately re-reading Thomas Friedman’s excellent book, ‘Thank you for being late’, I can’t help but see the correlations between the highlights of the acceleration and impact of big data and the role Sigma is to play in the AM industry. Sigma, in particular Printrite3D Analytics, is the epitomy of how data is now transforming every aspect of our world, and in particular engineering and industries such as Additive Manufacturing.

A few quotes

“Data is the new oil”, explained Brian Krzanich, the Intel CEO, “oil used to underlay everything - the automotive industry, plastics, chemicals, electrification and transportation”, and there were huge economic benefits derived from its infrastructure - from the ships, the pipelines, refineries and gas stations that were required to move the oil around. Oil and gas infused themselves into every aspect of life and commerce.
“You can say the same today about data,” added Krzanich. Instead of oil wells, though it’s microchips and servers; instead of refineries, it’s data centres and software; and instead of pipelines , its bandwidth and fibre optic cables, but the data they pump out are infusing every aspect of life and commerce.
And just with oil, those who ar most adept at drilling for this data, that is digitising it, amassing it, storing it - and then using algorithms to analyse, optimise, customise phrophesize, and automatize to improve every possible service, design, customer experience, or manufacturing process - will be the winners.
And those who don’t, concluded Krzanich, “will be dead in 5 years”
Because the difference between those who use big data to create AI to analyse, optimize, customize, prophesize, and automatize and those who don’t will be mammoth. Those who can analyse massive amounts of data will be able to spot trends that could never have been seen before.

This is exactly what Printrite3D analytics does, and something that sets it apart from any other independent quality inspection tool for AM. It correlates HUGE data, it reduces it, and then makes it readable, definable and crucially ACTIONABLE. On top of this, in the work Sigma has been doing with its EAP program and pioneer customers it already has a huge library of data correlating to the AM process which puts it leaps and bounds above competitors in predicting malfunctions well, well before a standard operator could. This is the defining technology of our era and Sigma is presenting it to the AM market. Is it any wonder our present CTO spent 20 years at Intel (5 of which under Krzanich)

Another quote goes on to say

What the DOS operating system did (Microsoft), in essence, was abstract away the differences in hardware between every computer. It didn’t matter if you bought as Dell, an Acer, or an IBM. They all suddenly hand the same operating system. This made desktop and laptop computers into commodities - the last thing their manufacturers wanted. This is how Microsoft got very rich.

Is this much different from Sigma’s ability to work across machines, allowing supply chains to have a constant. Making the part the constant, not the machine? Should we see the OEM’s capitulate and start including PrintRite3D into their machines (as the insinuation came following Formnext), then this will be a huge sign that Sigma will become much, much bigger than many can imagine.

One think that Sigma does is take away the complexity and abstracts it away. It creates a baseline that the person looking to solve the next problem just starts with, avoiding the need to master the complexity themselves. You just add PrintRite3D and build up from there. This is exactly how Additive Industries came to look at Sigma. CEO Daan Kersten once said along the lines of , Sigma are experts in that field, why would we try and re-invent the wheel. They chose Sigma to be their baseline. At the end of the day, The battle for inspection is only one part of a much bigger AM picture. Companies want to build, they want to design, they want to create using AM. Once a standard independent quality data algorithm tool is set, once a base line established, then the industry can really take off. Sigma, with their heritage in world class data algorithms from Los Alamos, are extremely well placed to be that baseline.


PS
The partners ticker on the home page is becoming really telling. A literal who’s who in AM