Your printers can run for hours. Why does keeping them organized still feel like a full-time job?
One machine is finishing. Another is waiting for the right material. A customer wants an update. Somewhere, a perfectly good part is sitting on a build plate while the next job waits.
At Stuntz Manufacturing, we spend our days turning practical problems into parts. Now we're taking a closer look at the work around those parts—and building a tool to help manage it.
Meet Print Foreman, our print farm management app, being developed on our working farm in Cumberland, Wisconsin. Here's a first look at the idea, the screens, and the questions driving it.
If you added five printers tomorrow, would your capacity grow—or just your to-do list?
This is a development preview, not a general-availability announcement. The app screens below show sample jobs, customers, quantities, and costs—not customer records or measured performance results. Features and appearance may change.
What if you could see the whole shop at once?
A print farm is a group of printers working together. But running several machines often means keeping track of several separate conversations: What's printing? What's idle? What needs attention?
Print Foreman's dashboard brings fleet status, running jobs, and printer camera views into one browser-based workspace. The aim is simple: make it easier to understand what's happening without having to assemble the answer from scattered screens.
That leads to a useful question: When you check your printers, are you making a decision—or just checking? A clear view should help you identify the next action, not simply give you another screen to watch.
The next job needs the right printer—not just an idle one
An available machine isn't automatically the right machine. Material, color, nozzle, and readiness all matter.
Print Foreman's queue is designed around matching jobs with suitable idle printers, including the required material, color, and nozzle. The per-printer view shows what is running and what is waiting. A separate Printer Ready step lets the operator confirm that a machine is ready for its next job.
Consider the moment a printer finishes. Does someone immediately know what belongs on it next? Has the plate been cleared? Is the right material loaded? Those small handoffs deserve as much attention as the print itself.
The goal is to make the next sensible step easier to see while keeping real-world readiness checks in the workflow. Supported hardware and setup requirements will matter; this preview is not a promise of compatibility with every printer.
A finished print isn't a finished order
The printer says “complete.” The customer is still waiting.
Between those two points may be inspection, sorting, inventory, packing, and shipping. Print Foreman's preview includes dedicated views for orders, part inventory, quality checks, and shipping status, along with files organized into part families.
For a shop making repeat parts, this distinction is important. A box of printed pieces does not automatically tell you which order is complete, what still needs checking, or what's available for the next request.
What would change if “Where is that order?” didn't require a walk around the shop? That is the kind of everyday question we're designing around.
Busy printers are one thing. Understanding costs is another.
A spool of filament is only part of the cost of a job. Machine time, hands-on labor, packaging, fees, and allowances for failures or overhead can change the picture.
The cost-calculation preview brings those inputs together so an operator can examine the assumptions behind a part's estimated cost and margin. It is a planning view, not a guarantee of profit—and the quality of the estimate depends on the numbers entered.
Here's a thought experiment: If your most popular part doubled in orders next month, would you want to make more of it at the current price? A fuller cost picture can help you ask that question before a busy week answers it for you.
Built around a real farm—and still being developed
Print Foreman uses a Bridge: a small Windows program running on a PC at the farm that communicates with printers over the local network. The browser is where the operator sees and manages the workflow.
We're also developing printing through an internet outage and testing that work on our own farm. Offline operation is still in development; it should not be treated as an available, proven capability yet.
The larger idea isn't to remove the person who knows the machines. It's to put the information that person needs closer together: printer status, the next job, the right file, the inspection step, and the order that needs to leave.
What would you hand to your foreman first?
Imagine starting tomorrow with a clearer answer to three questions:
- What needs my attention right now?
- What is keeping the next job from starting?
- What is keeping the finished work from reaching the customer?
Which one would make the biggest difference in your shop?
We'd like to hear it. Tell Stuntz Manufacturing what you would hand to Print Foreman first—and mention if you'd like to hear more as the app develops. No perfect feature brief needed. A real shop-floor frustration is a useful place to start.
And if your immediate challenge is a physical part rather than a software workflow, contact us about a replacement part, fixture, jig, or prototype. That's still where our work begins: a practical problem, and a better way to solve it.