FACTUREE, the Online Manufacturer has sponsored this post.
You design a part and choose a material that makes sense on paper—only to find out later that it’s harder to machine, finish or source than you anticipated. As it turns out, material, geometry and process decisions are more connected than they look at first.
German digital procurement specialist FACTUREE uses its AI-driven platform to produce custom parts by drawing on data from thousands of previous orders and suppliers, helping link material choices with how parts will eventually get made.
Moritz König, co-founder and CEO of FACTUREE, says the idea behind FACTUREE was born out of firsthand frustration. An engineer with several patents under his belt, he worked in startups where he found himself also responsible for sourcing the parts he had designed.
“That was a horrible experience,” König recalls. “It was so bad that I set out to make this problem go away. We’re making steady progress, but it’s such a complex problem.”
The complexity plays out in tolerances, manufacturability, lead time and cost. “There’s no part I’ve seen that is totally optimized,” says König. “That’s an illusion, to think you’ve designed the perfect part and have the setup exactly right.”
König suggests starting with geometry. Big, cheap and strong parts may point to sheet metal bending or cutting; intricate designs to 3D printing; fast, precise motion to machining; high volumes to moldable designs. “Once you’ve decided what type of part this will be, then you know your process, and from the process you get the material.”
Standard materials should be chosen before exotic ones if they are not necessary. “FACTUREE has around three hundred different materials in our database,” says König. “Yet for most applications, you probably need just five—because most applications are not racing cars, fighter jets, going to space or quantum computers. You could shave off so much pain, delivery time and cost by choosing standard materials.”
König also stresses the importance of shifting left on the manufacturing curve. “The mistakes you make grow with every single step. In our daily work, we see that even huge companies have parts that are so far down the funnel that you really can’t change them anymore. They’re costing the companies huge amounts of money.”
In many cases, one engineer over-specifies a part during design. Later, procurement wants to buy it cheap. Loosen one tolerance or change one angle, and the part becomes manufacturable in a different way.
“Do your homework early, even if it costs you a month extra or you have to do some extra tests,” says König. “It’s worth it. Don’t try to skip stages. This always comes and gets you. Although it’s paradoxical, the more effort, time and money you put in at the front, the less the entire process will cost you.”
What makes FACTUREE unique
FACTUREE works exclusively with commercial clients, supporting small and medium-sized companies as well as large industrial customers like CERN, Siemens and Parker Hannifin.
“To my knowledge, we’re the only company of our type that can offer not just a narrow band of manufacturing parts, but actually all of them,” says König. “If you request something today and we can’t do it — which is rare — we’ll learn how to do it and in a few months we can.”
As a platform focused specifically on procurement of parts, FACTUREE uses AI systems to match custom parts with suitable suppliers. Its knowledge base is built on proprietary data the company has collected since its founding in 2017, including billions of data points on real-world prices, lead times, quantities and manufacturing knowledge.
“We were using AI before it was cool,” says König. “From the beginning, we made sure that with every interaction with suppliers, clients and employees, our system learns.”
FACTUREE operates across a network of more than 2,000 manufacturing partners across Europe and worldwide, enabling distributed manufacturing through a single point of contact.
“We built the company from day one being totally agnostic toward the countries of the suppliers we cooperate with, within the law,” explains König. “The idea was to give you the best price, lead time and quality available for your specific type of part. As an added benefit, for bigger projects we qualify many suppliers at once. If there’s a natural disaster and one supplier is out, we can seamlessly increase supply from another supplier.”
FACTUREE combines its procurement platform with direct human involvement, rather than functioning as an anonymous black box. As soon as a customer submits a request, they are assigned a personal commercial contact who remains throughout the entire project. A dedicated technical contact, trained as an engineer and experienced in manufacturing, supports decisions early on.
“That’s why we love projects where we can go through all the stages together, from prototyping to full series production,” says König. “We don’t lose any knowledge. There’s no break in between. You can always speak to the same people.”
With real-life materials and processes, there is always the potential for something to go wrong. When that happens, FACTUREE takes full responsibility to resolve the issues.
“We are not a network where we connect people and then we’re out,” says König. “We are almost nine years in business and have never had a single lawsuit against us from a client. Trust is the most valuable resource in our business, and we won’t waste it. It’s better to be too customer-friendly than the other way around.”
To learn more, visit FACTUREE.