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CS Onboarding Playbook: Additive Manufacturing

This page contains operational rules, definitions, decision principles, and common pitfalls for AM onboarding. For execution, follow the runbooks (links below).

How To Use This Page

Use this page for rules, definitions, decision principles, and common pitfalls.

For execution, follow:

Roles

  • Customer Success Manager (CSM): single customer contact. Owns intake, clarifies needs, collects data, hands off to CS Ops. Reviews outputs and informs the customer.

  • Customer Success Operations Assistant (CS Ops): executes all operational work in 3D Spark for every onboarding. Builds machine, material, and process chain. Runs calibration and validation when required. Produces evidence pack and informs CSM. Never contacts the customer.

Operational Rules

  • All 3D Spark actions must be done in the customer's 3D Spark organization (never internal/test orgs unless there is a clear reason).

  • Customer communication is email.

  • File transfer is a shared upload folder. Avoid email attachments.

  • Ask the customer once. The intake email and upload package should contain everything needed.

  • Reuse existing machine + material + parameter set by default.

  • Calibrate only when build time is a cost driver or the customer contract requires it.

  • Acceptance for build time dependent onboarding should be based on total cost accuracy using the benchmark method (3D Spark cost with main-process build time overwritten by slicer estimates). Validation is based on Cost WMAPE on the standard validation dataset. Reason: Cost acceptance threshold is set to 10% Cost WMAPE.

  • Material consumption is not calibrated. Material consumption is calculated by 3D Spark.

  • Do not mention calibration status to the customer (PASS or FAIL). Only state that the setup is ready for their use or if preferred, their internal validation.

Definitions

  • Process Chain: the customer workflow from CAD to shipped part. Includes pre-process, main process, post-process.

  • Main Process Cost For AM

    • machine runtime × machine hourly rate

    • material consumption × material cost

    • supervision labor during runtime × labor hourly rate

  • Machine + Material + Parameter Set: the combination that defines build time behavior in 3D Spark.

  • Parameter Set: the customer’s production print settings, provided via a slicer project file.

  • Standard Calibration Dataset: internal CAD set used to fit parameters. Not used for acceptance.

  • Standard Validation Dataset: internal CAD set used to compute Cost WMAPE and decide acceptance.

  • Cost WMAPE: weighted mean absolute percentage error on total cost, used as the acceptance metric.

Decision Principles

When Build Time Is Relevant
Treat build time as relevant if the customer’s main process includes machine runtime or supervision labor during runtime as a cost driver.

When Build Time Is Not Relevant
Treat build time as not relevant if pricing is independent of runtime, for example volume based pricing, bounding box based pricing, formula based pricing, or material only pricing. In this case, do not calibrate.

Reuse Policy
Default path for 3D Spark is "reuse if a machine + material + parameter set already exists". Reuse is valid unless the customer reports results are not accurate enough.

Reuse Exceptions without Recalibration

  • infill density change only

  • same machine behavior, different build envelope

Folder And Evidence Principles

  • The customer only gets access to Customer_Upload. This is the only shared link.

  • CS Ops stores all work artifacts and evidence in CS_Internal. CS Ops does not store work artifacts in Customer_Upload.

  • If anything must be shared with the customer, the CSM decides and copies only the specific file into Customer_Upload.

How-to module:

Calibration And Validation Principles

  • Calibration fits parameters using slicer-estimated build times from the standard calibration dataset.

  • Validation measures accuracy using total-cost comparison on the standard validation dataset (baseline 3D Spark total cost vs benchmark total cost with slicer-overwritten main-process build times).

  • Acceptance is decided by validation, not calibration.

If Cost WMAPE cannot reach < 10%:

  • document “accuracy target not achieved”

  • do not iterate further

  • hand over to the customer for validation with clear expectations

Common Pitfalls

  • Running steps in the wrong 3D Spark organization.

  • Customer uploads STL or STEP instead of a slicer project file with settings.

  • Customer provides a slicer project that is not their production parameter set.

  • Calibration and validation are run with different parameter sets.

  • Evidence in \Evidence folder is missing, so results cannot be reviewed later.

  • Calibration is done unnecessarily when reuse or non-time-based pricing would have been sufficient.

  • Library reuse is skipped and plates are rebuilt from scratch.

What Good Looks Like

  • One-shot intake completed without follow-up requests.

  • Process chain modeled with clear cost drivers and rates.

  • If build time dependent: validation completed with Cost WMAPE < 10%, or miss documented.

  • Evidence pack complete and stored internally.

  • Customer receives “ready for validation” with minimal friction.

Where To Go Next

Execution

How-to Modules
(Also referenced in the Runbooks above, so no need to check one-by-one)

If Validation FAILs or Customer Reports Accuracy Issues

Customer Articles For Emails