Stanley Black & Decker Partners with AstroPrint to Create a Distributed Network of 3D Printers

AstroPrint is announcing a partnership with Stanley Black & Decker to connect, control and optimize their fleet of 3D printers across multiple facilities. With AstroPrint’s Enterprise Cloud, Stanley Black & Decker will automate its additive manufacturing systems and workflows on a single platform, ensuring that resources are shared and optimized.

With use of additive manufacturing increasing within Stanley Black & Decker, the first step, according to the company, is to connect all of their teams and 3D printers that are currently distributed in different offices dotted around the globe. These printers are used for prototyping new product designs to small-run manufacturing of parts in existing products. 

Once connected, Stanley Black & Decker’s engineers will gain a view of all the 3D printers in the fleet—from one dashboard. They will be able to share resources, using any available 3D printer at any office around the world, or control fleets of 3D printers from a single system for larger scale projects. 

Their managers will also be able to set permissions for different teams, and different members within each team, based on their roles and responsibilities. Access may also be granted to external contractors and consultants. 

AstroPrint Enterprise Cloud will enable Stanley Black & Decker engineers to collect data on their 3D printer fleet as well as check the usage, productivity and issues of each printer. Stanley Black and Decker will use this data to continuously optimize their workflows and make intelligent decisions on scaling up and scaling out their 3D printing processes.

Senior managers and business development teams will be able to use the data to review the returns on investment (ROI) on each project, make accurate projections and budget planning, as well as create business cases on new areas of opportunities and growth.

“Thanks to this partnership, we will gain visibility into ROI, uptime, value, resource optimization and competence development in regards to 3D printer usage at Stanley Black and Decker,” says Martin Guay, VP of Business Development at Stanley Black and Decker. “These are critical drivers for additive manufacturing success for every enterprise. We are confident that the AstroPrint software solution has a great deal of promise for us and for the industry.”

“We’ve been in the 3D Printing industry for a long time now and we are proud to have pioneered one of the first (and best) software systems to manage 3D printers through the cloud,” says Drew Taylor, CEO of AstroPrint. “It’s now time for us to anticipate the needs and bottlenecks that large, multi-location companies, such as Stanley Black & Decker, will face as they invest significantly to grow their Additive Manufacturing programs.”

AstroPrint’s focus now is to scale out the AstroPrint Enterprise Cloud, bringing on more large manufacturers who need to connect, control and optimize their 3D printer fleets.

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Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.