Sintavia is pushing the additive manufacturing factory into the future

Brian Neff and his team have built Sintavia into one of the most sophisticated additive manufacturing companies in the world. Founded as a metal 3D printing service bureau printing a myriad of parts for the aerospace industry, Sintavia has grown to become the foremost manufacturer of thermodynamic components for the aerospace industry. “It’s really no secret that one of the killer apps for metal 3D printing is heat exchangers, where you have a hot fluid flowing next to a cold fluid in a very tight compressed boundary condition. We saw heat exchangers as a market we could dominate, and since then, we’ve focused our business on this goal,” said Neff.

However, expanding Sintavia into the business it is today took a strong focus on the software process of additive manufacturing from design to production. “When you look at our approach to software,” Neff says, “we want to have the same vertical alignment as the rest of our operation. We want to rely on one suite of products that we can go from start to finish. Siemens offered us the best end-to-end package, and we’ve been expanding it on both the design and production end as the business has evolved and grown.”

“We started with Teamcenter,” he adds. “Teamcenter locked down all of our data, all of our processes, and that was big because that’s very auditable. Then we started implementing Opcenter.” “What we have now goes beyond a dashboard,” Neff says. “We have a tool that allows managers, including myself, to monitor and track how work is progressing through our system, and to identify areas for continuous improvement.”

You can find more information about how Sintavia is managing their additive manufacturing operation in our new success story video below.

All images courtesy Sintavia.