Provider Boosts Your Prototyping and Manufacturing Resources

Everybody gets in a crunch when they must rev up prototyping and production to get to market fast. Here's a way.

Specialists from FATHOM provided engineering support and surge manufacturing capabilities that helped a team of Mercedes-Benz new product developers go from sketches to real-world field testing within a tight four-week time frame. Image courtesy of FATHOM.


Tony LockwoodDear DE Reader:

A guy I know is a film script doctor. Pre-/post-production, in production, looming deadlines, whatever stage or reason, a text arrives, and he's off to apply his creative skills to make some endeavor shine. Everybody, even the best engineering design and manufacturing teams, needs a skilled hand now and then to make ideas real. Recently, I got turned onto an outfit called FATHOM. They could well become your go-to engineering and manufacturing doctors.

Your nickel tour is that FATHOM is not a design house. It's a technology-driven service provider and manufacturer of prototypes and production parts. They can help you get to market faster in many ways: Design and engineering support, 3D printing, machining, turning, laser cutting, urethane casting, injection molding, industrial additive manufacturing and so on. You need a hand fast? They appear to have ample expertise and nimbleness to make things happen.

They seem more than that. For example, FATHOM's engineering and design teams work in an advanced manufacturing facility with multiple units of different kinds of industrial equipment that, being hands-on people, they know how to exploit. This also means that they can iterate designs and problem-solve for you quickly.

FATHOM's team of experts can also augment your in-house crews with mechanical concept development support, design for manufacturing guidance and industrial design decision-making. FATHOM even sells and supports Stratasys, Nano Dimension and Desktop Metal equipment. But that's a digression.

Yeah, you say, what can they do for me? Click on that image up top or here. It launches a short video that gives you a glimpse of how FATHOM works with your team to collaboratively boost your new product development and production processes.

The plot is that Mercedes-Benz Xtron Lab, an R&D arm, needed electromechanical tiles for a cargo delivery management system. It's a cool project, BTW.

Naturally, the Mercedes-Benz team had just four weeks to go from hand-drawn sketches to the full electromechanical production assembly. This is where FATHOM comes in. By combining everybody's resources and design, engineering, additive manufacturing and traditional manufacturing expertise, they made over 240 of these smart, connected electromechanical tiles go from concept to field testing on time. Good stuff.

The more you poke around the FATHOM website, the more intrigued you'll become. Look, millionaire movie moguls, large, world-renown engineering and manufacturing companies, your joint … everybody needs an ingenious, helping hand at some point. When your times comes, consider using FATHOM.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood, Editor at Large, DE

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