Global3D runs industrial-grade 3D printing, CNC machining, laser engraving and finishing out of Perth. Their customers don’t want to wait three days for a quote — and Global3D didn’t want to spend three days writing one. So we built them a platform that takes a customer from STL upload to accepted quote to tracked job, in a single coherent flow.
Brief
Global3D came to us with two problems happening in parallel. The customer-facing side was bottlenecked by manual quoting — every job started with someone opening a 3D file, eyeballing the geometry, estimating material and time, and emailing a PDF back. The internal side was a patchwork of spreadsheets and shared inboxes, where job status lived in someone’s head until it didn’t.
They needed one system that handled marketing, ecommerce for pre-designed prints, custom quoting with real geometry analysis, payment, and an internal job board the production team could actually run a shop floor from.
How we helped
We built Global3D an integrated platform — public marketing site, customer quoting portal and internal admin all under one roof. Customers upload an STL through the site; a geometry-analysis service interrogates the file in real time and returns volume, dimensions, weight and estimated print time. Our pricing service combines that with material, labour and shipping rules to generate a live quote — the customer can toggle line items and shipping options without a page reload, and accept or reject from a tokenised portal link.
Payments flow through a secure online gateway. Pre-designed prints are sold through a separate ecommerce path so Global3D has two revenue streams — bespoke jobs and catalogue products — running through one platform.
Internally, the job lifecycle runs on a configurable state machine. Status transitions, the emails they trigger and the rules around them are all managed by the production team without involving developers. The admin gives them a Kanban board over both job types, plus customer, contact, supplier, blog, portfolio and discount management — twenty-seven areas in total.
The whole thing is wrapped in two-factor authentication, captcha protection and reliable transactional email, with automated tests covering the workflow logic that matters most.
Quoting that used to take a day now takes a coffee.