LEO Lane Software-as-a-Service Ensures Consistent Additive Manufacturing

LEO Lane offers a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution to help corporations uphold brand integriety and protect IP by securly managing additive manufacturing. The company supports brands as they scale production in AM, securing digital assets and enforcing control over the quality, consistency and quantity of parts and products. Lee-Bath Nelson, co-founder and VP business at LEO Lane, introduced the company’s SaaS solution in a presentation at Formnext 2018.

“The benefits of additive manufacturing are widespread and well-recognized, but they come with perils,” says Moshe Molcho, LEO Lane’s Co-Founder and CEO. “We are meeting these issues head-on with a solution that ensures lock-tight protection for brands using additive manufacturing in virtual inventories, on-demand production, or other production capacities.”

Once a brand has identified which part it wants to additively manufacture and has established the correct way to produce it (printer type, material, machine settings, etc.), the company’s SaaS solution secures it as a LEO, or Limited Edition Object, file. This is a digital asset that protects and preserves a product or part design by controlling how it is produced. The files are handled according to the specific corporation’s existing IT policies and procedures. According to the company, this means no extra installations, no appliances, no special handling or transfer protocol is needed. The creation of LEOs and their control points can be fully integrated in order to be automatic and seamless. When the file is ordered via a standard ERP system, the LEO Lane service is called in the background and the protected LEO is triggered. The company is integrated with many ecosystem platforms including SAP and Materialise to ensure as smooth and seamless an end-to-end process as possible.