Thinking outside the box

CiMFeb20Features - plyable1
CiMFeb20Features - plyable1

The composites tooling revolution continues! Mike Richardson meets with on-demand composite tooling specialists, Plyable to hear more about how the company is using artificial intelligence to bring composite solutions to life.

 

Design engineers used to dream of the day when they could simply box up their tooling designs in a file, upload them to the internet and enjoy peace of mind whilst they get made seamlessly in the background. If you need a mould designed and delivered to make your next carbon or glass fibre part, simply upload your design, get a quote instantly and let Plyable make this dream a reality!

Plyable is a supplier of composite tooling hardware to a range of manufacturers, and uses digital technologies and machine learning to automate the design and procurement process for composite tooling. It removes bottlenecks, lowers barriers and creates new opportunities for innovation and growth.

The ISO9001:2015 certified company’s first-of-its-kind solutions were recognised by Innovate UK in 2018 with endowment of a significant grant to fund and accelerate its technology development. The momentum continued to build last year, culminating in its first industry award for start-up business of the year at the Composites UK 2019 awards dinner.

Having more than doubled in size over the same period, Plyable now has customers across four continents and a distributed manufacturing network of more than 150 5-axis CNC machines producing solutions up to 45m in length.

What’s in a name?

Plyable was originally known as Mouldbox, but changed its name to better reflect the company’s strategic focus on building the future of composites manufacturing.

“Mouldbox with born with the simple idea of being the ‘Dropbox’ for moulds and it was a really good working title for what we originally set out to do - which was to tackle the problems around tooling,” begins Plyable’s CEO, Martin Oughton. “We’ve grown fast in the last two years - with much of our business coming from the US. However, the Americans spell the word ‘mould’ differently, so the name change is about aligning with our US customer base and not boxing ourselves into just offering tool mould solutions.”

Plyable’s Oughton receives an award for start-up business of the year at the Composites UK 2019 awards dinner

Oughton says that the origins of the company were born from frustration in the traditional toolmaking process, rather than seeing an opportunity.

“There had to be a better way of simplifying the process of quoting and designing tools. By chance, I met with an old school friend - our current COO, Adam England - who was running a start-up business working on interesting side projects, so I decided to present him with a proposal. We pitched the Mouldbox idea to various industry contacts and it wasn’t long before we received our first orders. This allowed us to put our day jobs on hold and start up our own business.”

Leveraging Big data

Oughton sees a growing momentum behind Industry 4.0 – something that is helping to catalyse the digital revolution of manufacturing. Plyable has harnessed the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to automate the design and manufacture of composite tooling. By uploading component CAD data into its Plyable app, businesses can take advantage of a pre-qualified, distributed manufacturing network and enjoy superior results as well as significant time and cost-savings.

“We are bringing ecommerce as a procurement solution for composite tools, and also bringing on Industry 4.0 automation technologies to reduce the labour costs in automation,” he explains. “The pattern & mould equipment suppliers are looking for design engineers to make good composite parts, so we are focusing on this issue. Whilst most machine shops are all very different, they have some similar traits in that they comprise high mix, low volume production, but are fairly inefficient when it comes to the job quoting side of things. Our initial goal was to provide an online quoting platform, but once we had built on this, we realised there was capacity in the marketplace and that we could build a model that makes the tooling supply chain much more efficient and drive better prices to our customers.”

Tooling made easy

It would seem that Plyable is taking the traditional toolmaking process by the scruff of the neck and bringing it into the 21st century as opposed to the typical method of finishing the design of a part - only to find that its tooling will be too expensive resulting in the entire project being cancelled.

Computer vision combined with stochastic gradient descent to optimise pull direction

“As an online composite tooling company, our website is all about uploading parts and tools and then generating a quote,” states company CTO, Adam Lofts. “Users can call up a composite component, our tooling software processes the geometry, analyses its mouldability, finds pull angles for the mouldability and then - based on this calculation - suggests optimal tooling configurations. Users can also specify a tool on either side if it is a closed mould. Our software will analyse the size of what the tool will need to be.

“We offer a range of material constructions, such as epoxy tooling boards and aluminium, plus we can quote for composite tools and ULTEM 3D printed tools. The price and lead-time changes dynamically depending on the material selected. We will also establish what process the customer is using and the cure temperature – this helps our engineers when they begin the tool design process. If a customer chooses a more complicated process, we’ll provide an estimate and enter into a consultation process.

“Typical lead-times are often around 7-10 days including the design, but we’ve also manufactured parts in three days, depending on the type of material initially specified. A busy Formula One season can affect lead-times, but a large part of our business proposition is scalable. We are very familiar with the Formula One network and can call on machine shops throughout Europe and US. There are more machine shops than Starbuck’s, so the capacity is out there; it’s really just about connecting supply and demand.”

Going for growth

Oughton is adamant that Plyable’s growth will continue and there will be an increase in the company’s marketing strategies to promote this. He wants the composites manufacturing industry to use Plyable’s software and normalise the entire process of tool design and manufacture.

“The demand side of business-to-business works really well in going online and using search engines like Google, so we want to get the message across to suppliers and engineers and get them to go online, find us and use our software platform,” he concludes. “Every other industry’s business is now conducted online, and yet composites manufacturing is one of the last to move across. We have to be out there banging the drum and leading the way. Once the industry sees the benefits, we will really start to turn people’s heads!”

www.plyable.com

Company

Plyable

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