Analytics – Beta

What to Expect

In a nutshell, we’ll be tracking and producing reports for a great deal of data related to production, machines, and business/revenue.

Historical Data's Start Date

Historical data won’t be available for most of these new features, as refined tracking only started within the last few weeks. As we discover bugs or nuances during the beta, we’ll apply fixes, but those fixes may not apply retroactively. As a result, some historical data may appear accurate while other portions may not. This will be the case until we complete the beta, which will then serve as the formal start date for historical data tracking.

Production

For the production tab, you’ll be able to see things like how many blue PLA parts you printed in a quarter compared to black PLA, or how much FDM work you’re doing versus resin. You’ll also see metrics like grams of material used or total printing hours. While some of this data is based on Formfactories’ estimates (and estimates aren’t always perfect), it’s highly reliable for evaluating percentages — for example, what percentage of your FDM material consumption is PLA vs. PETG.

Whenever possible, Formfactories references job filesA file that gets sent to a machine to make a model (like a .3MF, .gcode, etc.).Learn more → for greater accuracy. For closed-source machines where metadata from job files can’t be extracted, the data can also be input manually to override the estimates.

At the top of the page, you’ll see everything that’s currently in production. Below that, you’ll see historical data.

Completed Project Analytics

Each project now includes a summary at the bottom showing everything that's logged for a project as of the day the project is marked complete.

NOTE

Reports related to completed projects will always tie back to a project’s completion date rather than daily counts recorded within the project. This data can be edited within the project. If you'd like to remove the data from analytics altogether, you can do that as well.

Machines

We’ll be consolidating all data related to maintenance, including the time required to resolve issues. Once complete, you’ll get a top-level view of your most common problems, along with how long it’s taking to fix them. This will make it easy to spot patterns that can guide your maintenance strategy going forward. And, of course, it will also help highlight which of your machines are causing the biggest headaches.

Business

Production metrics will also tie back to revenue, making it easy to connect operational activity to financial outcomes. Currently, there isn’t a business section for enterprises that do not sell parts, since the data is only tied to sales. However, soon we’ll be adding data related to expenses, and that’s when this tab will become available.

CSV Export

We’re adding the ability to export CSV files across the board — for any time range, and with as many or as few fields as you need.