John Martin and Christine Bernat explain. John is the AM Research Director, America Makes, and Christine is the Associate Director, Standards Facilitation, American National Standards Institute. They describe how the latest standardization roadmap is affecting industry, trends with additive standards, and how doing the wrong type of inspection can cause you to miss out on the benefits of additive.

Michelle: To start off with, can you tell me what you are working on now related to additive standards?

John: I guess I should start by first, kind of touching on ANSI's role. So ANSI, the American National Standards Institute, it plays more in a role of a coordinator and convener. We don't actually write standards, so one of the ways that we help coordinate and convene experts are through workshops and standards collaboratives. Our partner for the additive manufacturing standards collaborative is America Makes. And this collaborative was actually first launched back in March, 2016.

And in July of last year, we issued our third roadmap for standards for additive manufacturing. And this activity has actually just evolved over time. And really the standards work has really just grown. And I'm sure we'll touch on that a little bit, more later in depth, but ultimately this last iteration of the roadmap from last summer really expanded a lot from a materials and processes and sectors kind of standpoint. And so, the roadmap doesn't actually outline standards and solutions. It really talks more about the issues that are happening within the sector, identifies gaps in research and standards development, and makes recommendations about how to sort of fill those gaps such as you know what organizations could help with the research and standards, specifically. And we do that with support of experts from the sector.

So, currently, the AMSC, or additive manufacturing standards collaborative, will just save us some time and I'll call it that from here on out, but has participation of over 300 experts from about 150 different organizations. So, literally the goal of the roadmap is just to help increase awareness about standards needs and help the SDOs identify kind of what they should maybe be investing their resources in and different standards development organizations or SDOs offer different strengths. So, what we've been working on is the roadmaps and in between each of the roadmaps, we publish gaps progress reports.

And what this includes is just updates on what the standardization and research community are doing to fill those gaps. So they'll highlight projects that are in development or they'll highlight things that have been published. And then oftentimes we see things like what policy and regulation or conformity assessment, basically related activities are out there. So that might be regulations and that might be certification programs and training and things like that. So the roadmaps and the gaps progress reports are primarily what ANSI is offering to the standardization community.

But then the standards development organizations themselves are the ones that are deciding what they want to champion. And then they're actually doing the content development within their own forums. And so these gaps development kind of check-ins along the way, is there one scheduled to come out soon? Or are those every kind of few years? Or is it, I know it's just last year since the roadmap came out, but yeah, we did our last, got a gas progress report in April of this year, and we'll be looking to issue the next one actually next month, if not early October. So it's about every six months.

The majority of the standards community tends to meet in the high conference seasons like the spring and the fall and so we try to aim for the gaps progress reports to report out on the work and decision making that's been done during those periods. So, what we'll see in the fall is, you know, a combination of work that had been done and decided in the spring and through the summer and then and then the spring version will kind of show you what happened in the fall and in the winter basically. So any more frequent than that. And you won't see much change over time because the groups really, they need time to digest the information and determine what they wanna work on effectively. Yeah, it's a big ship. You can't just turn right quickly. So it makes sense.

For more information on the AMSC and the Roadmap v3, visit www.ansi.org/amsc and Standardization Roadmap for Additive Manufacturing, Version 3.0.