Newsfilter article unlocker
Enter Newsfilter article ID in the field below. Example: https://newsfilter.io/articles/39be1bef03e66cdc886c08a2a6319c47
Retrieved article
Australia's manufacturers are under growing pressure to source parts faster, more efficiently and at the right price. Xometry is bringing its AI-powered manufacturing marketplace here to Australia, connecting local engineers with vetted global suppliers. For more, I'm joined in the studio by Sanjeev Singh Sani, CEO of Xometry. Great to have you at Ticker and welcome to Melbourne. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Talk to us about how I guess digital technology is changing the way companies are sourcing manufactured parts at the moment yeah so historically manufactured parts have always been sourced typically within a small radius near the factory especially if the part is a custom-made part that you've designed for a specific process or a specific technology of your own we've actually now been working to be that digital layer that's bringing the parts from offline manufacturing to online making job shops available to manufacturers everywhere in the world so basically if you want to source a custom part you no longer have to look in your neighborhood send them an email send them a phone call and that's how your source now you can really go on online find your price finally time why has this happened why are traditional supply chains no longer enough because you talk about the right part of the right place but we also think about just in time and for a lot these plants because manufacturing space is expensive, so therefore they don't want to keep it on site. So talk to us about what's actually changed for these supply chains. I would say three things have actually changed. One, the first and foremost is the nature of leadership that you're seeing in manufacturing companies now is actually shifting from millennials to actually people who have grown up digitally people who in their day-to-day lives use uber suddenly aging is both here yeah but it's it's up it's very obvious how some of the leadership in those groups is now people who've actually only grown up with the phone in the hand yeah and so therefore they want to do everything online have the experience be as smooth as it is in their personal lives and no longer want to deal with clunky b2b software either and those people are questioning why do I have to send so many emails? Why do I have to wait so long? There has to be a better way to do it. Yeah, very much so. So Xometry is now officially launching in Australia, which is why you are here at the moment. Talk to us about how the platform works and how it tries to solve this very problem we're talking about. Like I mentioned, we're the digital layer between the manufacturer and the job shop that creates the custom parts. So we've started as a data science and machine learning company 13 years ago And we've basically now looked at millions of parts that have been produced and timed over these years. So what we do is, if you go on to Xometry.co.au, you upload your CAD file or your design, and instantly, within 30 seconds, you get the price and the lead time for how that part can be produced and what it costs. Compare that to multiple weeks. I mean, it used to be two to three weeks before you could even get a price or a lead time. And is a lot of that AI doing the grunt work? Exactly. We've called ourselves an AI-native platform because we've now deployed AI not just on the online pricing, but even everything that goes beyond that, which is how do we look at the manufacturability of the part? How do we make sure that the right supplier in the right geography with the right machines and capabilities is going to do that? And then we vet and monitor the quality of the product using AI as well. Gosh, it's going to be funny the next 20 years when the generation growing up with the iPhone gets usurped by the generation that grew up with AI, isn't it? Talk to us about which Australian industries you think stand to benefit, to gain from this sort of model, this sort OF technology. We see the opportunity in Australia to be immense. Just think about some of the numbers that get quoted. I had the economists say that there is $156 billion US dollars of investment in data centers. Australian government has allocated about $22.7 billion on clean tech. So you're seeing a lot of investment going into data centers, clean energy, physical AI, robotics. Medtech. Medtech is big. I mean, those are the four or five big industries that we see. Now, for you guys, Isometry, I mean you've got, what, 85,000 customers shipped over, 165 million parts. Obviously in expansion mode. That's why you're talking about Australia as well. Why do you see that global experience as, I guess, helping to bring better outcomes to Australian businesses and wherever you're scaling to? We recently published a report on manufacturing. We call it the Manufacturing Outlook. And one of the biggest things that came out of that was access. Today, as manufacturing sectors are starting to expand around the world, the ability to find the right supplier at the right price point, the access to the right manufacturing capacity is becoming the challenge. And we, as a global platform with presence in the U.S., in Europe, in Asia, are able to find you that right partner at the right price point that you want to build your new med device on, you want the next data center on. And I think, to me, that is the real value that we are able to bring to our customers who actually now want to go faster. Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, look, it's coming at a time where everyone's talking about local manufacturing. I think we learned the hard way during COVID, what happens if everything is in one country and you are just importing. Sanjeev, really appreciate your time. If people want to find out more, where can they go? Xometry.com.au and Xometry... With an X. With anX. Wonderful. Appreciate your time, thank you so much. I appreciate that, thankyou for having me.