Name: Accelerating Innovation with ProDesk by Protolabs
Uploaded: 2026-03-25T17:01:35.994Z
Duration: 20 min 20 s
Description: Accelerating Innovation with ProDesk by Protolabs

Transcript for "Accelerating Innovation with ProDesk by Protolabs": Hello, everyone. I am Mark Flannery. I'm the global product director of ProDesk, and I'm excited to demonstrate and discuss with you our digital manufacturing platform today. At Proto Labs, our vision is to accelerate innovation by revolutionizing manufacturing, and ProDesk helps bring that vision to life. Today, we're I'm just gonna go through a few slides giving an overview of ProDesk, But the most of the time that we'll we'll be having is we'll be, doing a demonstration of the application and all its capabilities. And then, we're gonna take time to answer any of your questions and respond to feedback that you might have. So throughout this presentation, please be submitting your questions or if there's any features or capabilities you'd like us to be building in the future. I'm very, interested in hearing, your suggestions and ideas, please submit those throughout the throughout the presentation here that from the beginning. So just recently, you may have heard we now have a new identity for our our application for our award winning platform, and that's ProDesk. And ProDesk is for prototyping. ProDesk is for production. And, hopefully, ProDesk helps you innovate faster and bring your products to life. So, in addition to a new identity for our our platform or the Proto Labs portal, we now have a home page, when you start. And it was designed based on a lot of customer feedback, some of your cut and feedback. And we've been we keep expanding the capabilities of what our our software can do, what our application can do for you, and then what our manufacturing services can do for you. So we had identified a number of use cases that we wanna be able to make it easier for you to find, for you to navigate through, and get to the stuff that you've been working on. So we're gonna review that that homepage, but behind the scenes is still all the great capabilities that you're used to from our fast quoting and industry leading speed to manufacture to our DFM feedback, and then, of course, our awesome team of folks that are here to help you all every step of the way. Also, in the last months, we've been adding a lot of team collaboration capabilities that I'll be sharing with you and then a lot of focus on production capabilities. We wanna make it really easy for you to transition from prototyping to production and make make the tool much more usable by purchasing agents or quality engineers. And so to that speed of quoting and and manufacturing, not the same capabilities are there, and we've been expanding on those. So we've been expanding a lot on our capabilities within our factories. And so more and more, we can bring more complete parts, more diverse parts to you at our rapid speed, as well as we keep expanding our network of manufacturing partners to be able to also address any of the needs that you might have, as well as maybe they're more about economies of scale. And then our our our DFM is really a powerful component of of our our platform, and we really believe that we wanna identify any issues upfront, any kind of challenges that you might have, so that you potentially can just iterate virtually before actually start doing physical prototyping. Or after the order is placed, we wanna avoid issues downstream. So we wanna get those those parts to you as fast as possible. So our DFM is really critical to be able to show, you know, the the challenges or opportunities that you might have on your parts. And then I mentioned our our team of, support experts across the board. We want it's we're not just a digital platform. We're not just an online company. We wanna talk with you whether you wanna call, whether you wanna email, schedule a meeting, chat. We have a lot of ways for, you to get support. And then, I mentioned that, we've been adding a lot more capabilities. So everything on the platform, you can now share with your team members, and and you can, monitor orders together. You can share quotes, share orders, you can share quality documents, inspections, as well as we just built a new team catalog for production where you can share that catalog, and I'll be showing that. Along with them, we've been adding a lot at the production level of things, which really make is necessary to get down to a part level as opposed to operating at quotes and orders. So we've been adding a lot more granularity to our platform to help you out with that. So that is done just a a quick overview of of just the capabilities on the platform. Gonna now do a live demonstration, and, hopefully, I hit the right buttons here. I'm kinda new to this, so Kaylee will will help me, if I if I can get some make make some mistakes here. Let me move this over here. It's loading. I hope it's loading. There we go. Alright. So, here is, ProDesk. And when you come in, you'll have the the the home page here. Now, if you're if you've been using, our applications for quite a while, all those core capabilities are still here along the left from your projects and quotes, your parts and molds, to the new production catalog and order history, etcetera. But we've, we've added this new homepage. And, you know, the most used one is still by far capability is is starting new quotes, uploading new CAD files, and and, usually, that's a prototyping type of situation. And so that's still there. You can get it from here, here, or many other places on in the application. But then, also, sometimes you might have more complex projects that you wanna work on that you just don't start by uploading a CAD file. And so we really wanna give that opportunity for you to reach out to our team, describe what it is that you wanna try and do, and our team will, get back with you and and help you on that journey. And then, we have a lot more purchasing agents and quality engineers accessing, our platform. And because there's so many different ways of reordering, we wanted to make it so that, we could help, who whatever your role is, do find a a faster way of reordering. And so we we we'll be talking about that catalog. So maybe you are a purchaser that has been shared a catalog, so you can go to the production catalog to do that reordering. Maybe you have a purchase order number that you're looking for and you wanna find a past order, so you could go that route, or you could go in much more in a detailed level and go into our part history. Also, we have, you know, many places here. I I talked about our awesome support team, but we wanna make it so that if you wanna call us, wanna chat, if you have a a ticket you wanna start, whether it be order questions, document requests, change requests, all those kind of things. We wanna streamline that communication into our in our c r CRM system. Or if you, are looking for guidance on the different services, we have many, resources available to you for each of the services right here to hopefully answer your questions, online. Then we're always interested in your feedback. Like I said, please submit it be submitting that right now in our chat. We always wanna get your feedback, and then, there's there's our email. So, in addition to those resources, of course, on our website, we have a lot of wonderful resources available to you, to, to help along the way. So, those are along the resources. And then one of the most popular features of the the new homepage is just recent activity. So it's really easy to be able to come in here and see what was I last working on, go into that project, and and dive in. So speaking of projects, you know, or or going into projects, we still have the ability for you to create those projects, and then put quotes within those, have orders in those to organize how you, best see fit, and then being able to come in here and and get to your quota order. And then as I mentioned, we've been continuing to expand our capabilities so that now more and more even our our own factories as well as our MP network, manufacturing partner network, can add a lot more capabilities and features, or needs for your part are there. And then I've I've mentioned the the DFM. Let's come here and go to another project. See. Lost my lost my place. Let's come in here. And whoops. Let me refresh. There we go. And then I had mentioned our DFM. And so if you're not familiar with it, it's it varies by service, but we have very detailed analysis of parts that come in so you can really dive in there and understand what kind of things are gonna be going on with the part before you order it. And if you need to upload a revision to your CAD model or whether, you know, these will work for you, our DFM is is still all there behind the scenes as it was before. So important capabilities there. Now I'm gonna shift over to the parts and molds. So over the last nine months or so, we've been adding this aspect to it, not just quotes and orders as I mentioned, but being able to really understand for the different parts what's going on, and that's true for molds too. So if if you have molds here, different molds would show up, and then you'd be able to see every order that you've done against that mold or on your parts here, which case then this helps, this level of granularity of getting into this history here is really important as as as you're going through prototyping, oftentimes, one of the challenges that that you've expressed is it becomes this haystack where you're trying to find what is the right part that I wanna reorder or have someone else reorder. And through through the order history then, you can get in here and maybe you might say, for this particular part, oh, yeah. You know, I've I've ordered it a few times. One time, it cuts couple times, it was this kind of aluminum or a different kind of aluminum or it had different broken edges or a bead glass, which is the one that I actually want to reorder in the future. And then you can come in here and pick that one that you're most interested in, and actually catalog that part for production. So what's really powerful here is, you know, when this oftentimes, when CAD miles get uploaded and such, they just have any kind of naming convention of the file of the CADNET, so the name we use for the the prototyping part oftentimes. But, now, you know, as it transitions, oftentimes, it actually gets a numbering system, in your system that you wanna file, and you have your own specific revision called for it and, and description for it. And by being able to do this, now you are giving it a much you know, your company's official name for it. So that now that I've cataloged that, I can come over here, and I can see that I have these catalog parts with the your your part number with your revision with your description. And that creates a one to one relationship with our part number, the Proto Labs part number, which we use to know exactly which part to get you when you reorder. And thus, this catalog becomes really easy for, making sure there's no mistakes when reordering. And we've recently added the capability of having team catalogs. So now I can come in here. I can go into this project, and maybe I I've I've created this catalog, and I've shared it with a number of team members that so there's five of us that have access to these parts. And maybe now I wanna add a part to that catalog. So it's just as easy as doing this. And simply by adding that production part to the catalog, now that those parts are available to everybody on the team. We've really gone down this route of being focused like this, because we've definitely heard from you that while it's important to be able to share parts sometimes without sharing order history, because, oftentimes, many of you have contract manufacturers. You want them to have access to the parts, but you don't want them to have access to all of the order history. So you don't wanna have to share orders past orders with them, but you do wanna share the specific parts. So then you you, you can you can just build these and and share them as appropriate. And that's lots of the stuff I wanted to demonstrate. You know, as you're sharing things, I'll get in here. I know we have the ability to, you know, now share your quotes, which, anytime you want, but also as you're checking out or after you've placed an order, it's easy to, share orders. You can come into the order. You have now access to almost all the the documents that we generate from from order documents to shipping documents to, quality inspection documents, are all, more and more online available for you. And we also make it, easy for you to actually email those and share those with team members, whichever documents, or just the order PDF if you want, and be able to, come in here and and and add your team members. It remembers team members that you've, used in the past. It looks like I typed something wrong here. But and so it's really easy. You don't have to be reentering the email over and over again. We keep track of of all the team members that you've shared with in the past, like I said, and you can add to that. So it just makes it really easy to share to the right person. We explored just doing this shared a whole group of folks on orders and quotes. But as I mentioned, there's a challenge that sometimes things get shared that you didn't mean to get shared. So we wanna have a lot more surgical sharing of stuff. And that gives you then a flavor of what's going on on ProDesk. And so, at this point then, I would love to start taking some of your, questions. Alright. So at this point, there are no questions. Please ask any that you might have. Or like I said, I'm really interested in in continually learning what new capabilities you'd like to have. So I I welcome that. Okay. So, yes, can you explain how you use network manufacturers? So so more and more, we have it so that we have our you know, we vet our manufacturing partners around the world. They're really critical to us to offer a full breadth of capabilities and offer a a more economical prices, those kind of things. More and more, you'll see in our system, for instance, sometimes when you're into ProDesk itself, you will see, options come up where you can you can pick that. So now you have, you know, a choice of, yeah, I'd I'd like to go with the network of of MPs that that I can use because that you know, I'm not in as big of a hurry, and I'm really more focused on economic prices. We're continuing to integrate the MP for right within the same quoting platform, but we always have links out to our our other companies, our our Proto Labs network of capabilities, and and our, more, traditional factories that we that we, that we own. And so we have links to those, or maybe when you're generating a quote, we also give that opportunity to jump between platforms, and we're continually working to merge those all onto this one ProDesk. I don't know if that answered the question of of or whether that question about explaining how we use the network of manufacturers if that, I was going a different direction on that. So, hopefully, that answered the question. Alright. Very good. Thanks for the thanks for that. Alright. Alright. Well, I don't see any other questions coming in or, things, but, I'm always all ears. Please contact Proto Labs, if and or email. We're constantly reviewing your feedback. We we reach out to customers, do interviews all the time. We really wanna make this as powerful and helpful for you as you go through the manufacturing process. So really appreciate you, taking the time to be with us today. And with that, we're gonna go ahead and end the webinar. Goodbye.