Industries served: Automotive, aerospace, engineering and design
Technologies: FDM/FFF, Binder jetting, SLS, SLA, DMLS, Multi Jet Fusion
Applications: End-use parts, tooling, low-volume production runs, prototypes
Mexico is a burgeoning hub for additive manufacturing, with industries like aerospace and automotive driving demand. One of the success stories to come out of this development is Tridi Mx, a 3D printing service provider located in Querétaro. Since its launch in 2013, Tridi Mx has serviced over 4,000 projects and produced more than 15,000 end-use parts, tooling aids and prototypes.
With a customer base that includes Safran, Valeo and Nestle, Tridi Mx has quickly become a leading player in Mexico’s additive manufacturing industry. Its recent partnership with Stratasys’ Global Manufacturing Network has helped the company expand significantly, giving its customers access to over 300 additional industrial 3D printers.
However, Tridi Mx’s rapid growth has brought challenges as well as opportunities. As operations have expanded, the company’s sales and production teams found it difficult to keep up with the pace of growth.
One key challenge lay in the company’s pricing process. Flooded with requests, the sales team would spend hours pricing parts.
“One of the main challenges we were looking to solve was our internal pricing process,” explains Sebastián Romo, founder and CEO of Tridi Mx. “Our sales team was losing at least four to five hours a day just quoting FDM parts. We recognised that this time spent quoting parts could be put towards developing more business opportunities.”
To price an FDM part, an STL file would need to be uploaded into slicing software, with a sales rep noting the projected time needed to produce the part. This information would then be put into a spreadsheet, where a formula would be used to calculate the final price of the part.
This was inevitably a slow and laborious way to calculate the price a part, especially when it came to larger parts.
In addition to the need to price parts both quickly and accurately, 3D printing companies like Tridi Mx are also faced with the task of educating the market.
“Our vision behind founding the company was to make additive manufacturing more accessible in Mexico and thereby help drive innovation,” says Romo. “As part of that, we actively pour a lot of resources into educating the local market.
“So we were also looking for a solution to help support this mission. This meant finding an online quoting system that that could help customers go through the buying process much more easily.”