Fieldmade Won Subsea Upcoming Company of the Year

This year's winner of the Subsea Upcoming Company of the Year Award is pushing the evolution of spare part production and physical inventory.

The award is granted every year under the Underwater Technology Conference, to a young company in the subsea industry. This year the award was granted to Fieldmade AS based in Lillestrøm and Nyskapingsparken in Bergen. The award is granted by GCE Ocean Technology, Sparebanken Vest and the Underwater Technology Foundation.

Fieldmade Timeline

Fieldmade started at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) in 2015, with a focus to develop a full-end deployable Additive Manufacturing (AM) capability for defence purposes.

The potential in this idea later proved to have an additional impact and attractiveness within ocean industries. The company was founded in 2016 on the basis of a research and development grant from the Research Council of Norway as part of FORNY2020. This realizing the core ideas into a viable proof of concept and a scalable business. Fieldmade has later grown to become one of the leading entities for applied industrial AM within Scandinavia.

Fieldmade has extensive experience within the full spectrum of the AM domain, and use this knowledge to develop both technology and services for the Energy and Defence sector. Fieldmade`s ambition is to move the transformational AM technology into logistics, this from the - “dreamer” phase to the “doer” phase. Their technology is aimed to transform the costly affair of upholding large physical warehouses, due to readiness concerns. Future logistics will be supported by digital warehouses and on-demand production, on site, in or near real time. In addition, Fieldmade`s services offer new and more efficient ways of solving repair, modification or obsolescence challenges.

Launching FIELDWARE

Fieldmade has already demonstrated the feasibility of their NOMAD® systems, deployable AM microfactories, under harsh conditions, the larger intent is to establish an agile AM network that supports immediate customer needs. Moreover, Fieldmade is currently on the brink of launching their FIELDWARE software solution that supports the overall digital spares ecosystem.

Linking OEMs, end customers, and an adequate production network on a transaction based digital spares cloud-platform. The available digital spare part population are selected on the basis of Fieldmade’s part selection algorithms that identifies relevant and attractive AM business cases for the OEM and/ or end customer, thus, enable build-up of relevant digital inventories through a subscription service.

Market Potential

Fieldmade believes that additive manufacturing is a core element of future sustainable spare parts management within ocean industries. – With this, Fieldmade see a large marked potential within oil and gas (both offshore and onshore), Defence, and Shipping. From our experience, and with the basis of the current state of the AM technology, we believe it is realistic to reduce physical spare parts inventories within these segments by 10-25 per cent and reduce repair or modification costs by 50-90 per cent, the operational and environmental effects are not yet known but are equally assessed to have a large impact, says CEO of Fieldmade Christian Duun Norberg.

– What our customers have in common is that they are challenged in modelling and predicting their actual needs, both short and long term, the risk and consequences of inoperability drives build-up of large and costly inventories. They often operate in remote and austere locations, they often need highly customized parts and are frequently challenged with obsolescence problematics. Their future aim is increased operability and/ or cost efficiency and improved sustainability - Fieldmade provide a set services and solutions that supports the customer in overcoming these challenges, by doing so we augment their current supply chain in a way that has not yet have been possible, to some degree unimaginable, and by doing so it provokes a series of questions whose answers are not yet available, continues Norberg.

Benefits

The benefits of using the Fieldmade solution are many, but the current main benefits are an improved and cost-efficient way of upholding spares based on critical readiness levels, this through:

• Reduction of physical warehouse costs
• Reduced repair and modification costs
• Reduced lead time and consequently improved operability
• Reduced CO2 footprint

– Fieldmade has shown that they are capable of using modern technology in a new way with a fresh innovative solution that we will see more and more of during the coming years in the ocean industries, with both impact on cost and time in a sustainable way, says CEO of GCE Ocean Technology, and head of the jury Owe Hagesæther.

Scaling

Although Fieldmade started in Norway less than 3 years ago, the company is already experiencing a large interest in their solutions from other countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and Finland. Going forward the company is working on expanding across additional sectors, Europe and into the US.

Fieldmade have offices at Lillestrøm, and in Nyskapningsparken in Bergen. The founders took part in and benefited greatly from the ACCEL Energy startup accelerator in 2018. Fieldmade has raised 12,7MNOK of research and development grants from the Research Council of Norway (FORNY2020) and 13,5MNOK through an Innovation Contract supported by Innovation Norway and the Norwegian Ministry of Defence.

We congratulate our member Fieldmade with the award.