--- # =========================================================================== # CUSTOMER STORY - OST 3D-Lab (Daniel Aeschbacher) # Built to the doctrine (.ai/testimonials/doctrine.md): interview, not narration. # Daniel's verbatim Q&A (saved in stories/ost.md) carries every claim; our prose # is a thin spine. Quotes are the trimmed core of HIS words, lightly cleaned for # grammar only (he's a non-native English speaker), never paraphrased. # # Angle (locked): FAIR, AUTOMATED COST-ALLOCATION ACROSS A WHOLE UNIVERSITY. # OST wired the SimplyPrint API + custom fields into their SAP finance system so # every print auto-bills to the right module/project/person, AND opened the lab # from one department to all ~2,200 students+staff across 16 institutes. The # "who pays?" problem is universal in institutions; OST is the school that solved # it. Hero feature = API + custom fields. First EDUCATION story (seeds /schools). # Distinct from Copenhagen Media HS (accessibility / any-teacher). # # IMAGES: REAL, consented lab photos (Daniel sent 8) - imported to the library at # images/hardware/workshop/ost/ for site-wide reuse AND web-optimised copies in # this testimonial CDN folder. Hero = the magenta "3D-Lab|OST powered by IPEK" # entrance sign. Headshot = a face-centred square cropped from his real lab # portrait. NO AI, NO stock. # # DATA (internal only - NEVER on-page): account "OST - Ostschweizer Fachhochschule" # (id 19368), joined 2024-02-28 ("since 2024", the closed beta); 8 active printers # (28 rows ever); 4,441 completed prints - corroborates Daniel's "~4,200 prints / # 350kg in two years". His stated numbers are used on-page (his to confirm). # =========================================================================== # Identity title: "How OST auto-bills every 3D print to the right module" slug: ost-university-3d-print-lab description: "How OST's 3D-Lab opened to ~2,200 students and staff across 16 institutes and auto-bills every print to the right module, via the SimplyPrint API, custom fields and Cloud Slicer." # Casting customer: OST 3D-Lab segment: schools sub_persona: university angle: "Fair, automated cost-allocation across a whole university: OST wired the SimplyPrint API and custom fields into SAP so every print bills to the right module or person, and opened the lab from one department to all 2,200 students and staff." hero_feature: API # Snapshot box region: "Rapperswil-Jona, Switzerland" fleet_size: "8 printers (expanding to 12)" brands: "Bambu Lab" plan: Academic since: "2024" customer_url: https://www.ost.ch # Oversized counterfactual hero quote (the page's centerpiece) - Daniel's voice. hero_quote: quote: "Without the API it maybe would have been some Excel-shenanigans. Without the custom fields? Not a chance." attribution: "Daniel Aeschbacher, manager of the 3D-Lab, OST" # Metric strip - all Daniel's numbers, dated where they move. metrics: - label: "Open to" value: "~2,200 people" captured: "16 institutes, 11 programmes" - label: "Printers" value: "8 -> 12" captured: "growing with demand" - label: "Billing admin" value: "~15 min/month" captured: "was half a day, by hand" - label: "Prints" value: "4,200+" captured: "in 2 years, 350 kg filament" # Without / with table - his before (one department, hair-salon tool, Excel) vs now. before_with: - label: Who can use it without: "One department (mechanical engineering)" with: "All ~2,200 students and staff, 16 institutes" - label: Booking a printer without: "A hair-salon reservation tool, a fixed price per slot" with: "SSO login, slice in the browser, start and monitor remotely" - label: Billing a print without: "Copy-pasting into Excel by hand, half a day for a handful" with: "A SAP finance code per print, ~15 minutes a month for 400+" - label: Who pays without: "Hard to split fairly across courses and projects" with: "Auto-allocated to the right module, or billed to the person" # Media - REAL consented lab photos. Hero = the entrance sign. Inline shots run # through the body; gallery at the foot. Headshot = face-centred crop of his # real lab portrait. hero_image: hero.jpg photos: - src: lake-view-rack.jpg alt: "The OST 3D-Lab printer rack in magenta cabinets, glass walls and a lakeside-town view behind, finished prints on a shelf" caption: "The 3D-Lab is a compact glass pavilion on the Rapperswil-Jona campus - the whole fleet in magenta cabinets." - src: lab-desk-rack.jpg alt: "Side view of the OST 3D-Lab: the operator desk with monitors on the left, the magenta Bambu Lab printer rack on the right" caption: "One desk runs the lab. The printers self-serve; staff step in for filament and maintenance." - src: magenta-cabinets.jpg alt: "Glossy magenta printer cabinets in the OST 3D-Lab seen from the side, enclosed Bambu Lab printers in the bays" caption: "The lab's signature magenta cabinetry, built around the Bambu Lab fleet." # Speaker headshot + name (snapshot shows a face + a name, not just a logo). headshot: headshot.jpg speaker: "Daniel Aeschbacher, lab manager" video_youtube_id: # Logo - the OST ring mark (magenta/black, transparent), provided by Albert. The # snapshot leads with Daniel's headshot (warmer), but the logo renders next to the # customer name on the /testimonials index (featured block + story cards). logo: logo.png # SEO / schema og_image: https://cdn.simplyprint.io/i/landing/testimonials/schools/ost-university-3d-print-lab/og.jpg og_image_alt: "OST 3D-Lab - a Swiss university makerspace open to 2,200 students and staff that auto-bills every print to the right module via SimplyPrint" schema: Article target_keyword: "3d print cost allocation" secondary_keywords: - "3d printing for universities" - "university 3d printer lab management" - "3d print chargeback" - "bill 3d printing by user" - "makerspace 3d printing software" - "3d printing SAP integration" last_modified: 2026-06-16 published: 2026-06-16 # Feature-quote cards - each pairs a LIVE /features page with a verbatim Daniel # line. The three beats: the API that pulls the data (hero), the custom fields # that capture the SAP code per print, and the Cloud Slicer that onboards a # first-timer. SSO + statistics are linked in the body prose. NOTE: /features/slicer # + /features/statistics are opted OUT of testimonial highlights (in # FeatureBuilderController), so these cards live on the story WITHOUT OST # headlining those pages. feature_quotes: - feature: API quote: "We run on the SAP-System at our university; we needed a way to allocate the print cost to the specific modules and projects. At the end of a month, we request all the relevant data via the SimplyPrint API." - feature: CustomFields quote: "Thanks to the custom fields feature, which SimplyPrint developed (mostly) for us, we are able to do that. Before a print is started you must enter the specific SAP-number or label the print as private." - feature: Slicer quote: "For a first-time user the Cloud-Slicer is ideal for the first 3D-print of their life. If the print is sliced without any warnings, it can be started on one of our printers and monitored via SimplyPrint." # Web of features + conversion related_features: - MainSiteApp\Controllers\Frontpage\Features\APIFeatureController - MainSiteApp\Controllers\Frontpage\Features\CustomFieldsFeatureController - MainSiteApp\Controllers\Frontpage\Features\SlicerFeatureController - MainSiteApp\Controllers\Frontpage\Features\StatisticsFeatureController - MainSiteApp\Controllers\Frontpage\Features\MultipleUsersFeatureController - MainSiteApp\Controllers\Frontpage\Features\OrganisationManagementFeatureController related_testimonials: - copenhagen-media-high-school-3d-printing - lab3d-prusa-bambu-print-farm - weshape-automated-bambu-farm cta_inline: { text: "Start free, no credit card", url: "/panel/signup" } cta_final: { text: "Start free, no credit card", url: "/panel/signup" } # AI search / GEO tldr: | OST (Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences, Rapperswil-Jona) opened its 3D-Lab from a mechanical-engineering service to all ~2,200 students and staff across 16 institutes. The hard part of a shared university lab is "who pays?" - OST solved it by wiring the SimplyPrint API and custom fields into their SAP finance system: each print carries a SAP cost-code or is billed to the person, and what took half a day by hand now takes about 15 minutes a month. consent: "DRAFT - pending Daniel Aeschbacher's sign-off. Authored from his written Q&A (verbatim, lightly cleaned for grammar only - he's a non-native English speaker; saved in stories/ost.md). All numbers are HIS (~2,200 people, 11 programmes, 16 institutes, 8->12 printers, ~350 users, 4,200 prints / 350 kg in two years, half-a-day -> ~15 min) - confirm before merge. DB account 19368 corroborates: since 2024, 8 active printers, 4,441 completed prints. Real consented lab photos (8) imported to images/hardware/workshop/ost/ + web copies here; headshot cropped from his real lab portrait. TO CONFIRM: the exact 3D-Lab page URL for the do-follow link (currently ost.ch); the plan label ('Academic'); that naming SAP publicly is OK (offer 'their university finance system' as a fallback); a 3D-Lab/OST logo for the snapshot + schema; and video willingness. Get the written OK on file before production merge." --- The [OST 3D-Lab](https://www.ost.ch) sits in a glass pavilion on the Rapperswil-Jona campus of OST, the Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences. It started life in 2016 as a service for mechanical-engineering students. In 2024 it opened its doors to everyone, and that is where the interesting problem began. > The 3D-Lab is located at OST (Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences) in Rapperswil-Jona, Switzerland. The main goal with its creation in 2016 was to provide the possibility for mechanical-engineering students to have a hands-on experience with FFF 3D-printing. In 2024 we decided to expand the service to all students and employees of all study programmes and institutes. :::image src="https://cdn.simplyprint.io/i/landing/testimonials/schools/ost-university-3d-print-lab/student-with-prints.jpg" alt="A student in the OST 3D-Lab lifting a build plate of fresh magenta 3D prints off a Bambu Lab printer" caption="The lab is open to everyone - here a student pulls a finished plate. It serves everything from first-year visualisation models to real customer prototypes." ::: ## From one department to all 2,200 students and staff Opening a lab to a whole university sounds like a simple toggle. It isn't. Two things had to be true first: the printers had to be usable by people who'd never touched one, and there had to be a sane way to run the place. The hardware solved the first half. The software they were using did not solve the second. > A big reason was surely the advent of easy-to-use 3D-printers. This meant that also people with no prior 3D-printing experience would be able to use the hardware side of things without understanding the detailed working principle of an FFF printer. However, this did not solve the usability side of using the 3D-Lab. Before SimplyPrint we used a scheduling program which you would normally use for a hair saloon, where people could reserve 1, 3, 6 or 12 hours of a printer with a fixed price attached. This was barely working before and would not be feasible for a good user experience in the long run. > This is when we did our research and found SimplyPrint among all the other print-management software companies. SimplyPrint basically checked all our requirement boxes with its academic features, and with its young and dynamic team was open to work together with us to develop a solution to our billing problem. We needed to see who printed what, for how long, and how much material was used. This would allow us to bill the prints fairly to the different study courses and projects of the school. The reach changed completely. A service for a single department became something the whole campus quietly relies on. > Before the reopening there were about 40 people, from the mechanical-engineering department and the institute for product development IPEK (where I work), using the 3D-Lab - and only the ones who already had some 3D-printing experience from home or a prior job. Now there are about 350 users, and I think every study course and institute has at some point had a print allocated to it. Even a janitor once printed a birthday present for his son. :::image src="https://cdn.simplyprint.io/i/landing/testimonials/schools/ost-university-3d-print-lab/bambu-printer-rack.jpg" alt="A row of enclosed Bambu Lab printers with AMS units on the magenta rack in the OST 3D-Lab" caption="Eight Bambu Lab printers today, expanding to twelve - the lab is growing with demand." ::: ## "Who pays?" - a SAP cost-code before every print This is the part almost no institution gets right, and the reason OST's story is worth telling. A shared lab across sixteen institutes runs into one hard question immediately: when a print costs time and material, whose budget does it come out of? OST answered it by capturing the cost at the source - a [custom field](/features/custom-fields) the user fills in before the print even starts, carrying a code from SAP, the enterprise finance system that universities and large companies run their budgets on. > I guess mostly because of bureaucracy. We run on the SAP-System at our university; we needed a way to allocate the print cost to the specific modules and projects. Thanks to the custom fields feature, which SimplyPrint developed (mostly) for us, we are able to do that. Before a print is started you must enter the specific SAP-number, or label the print as private. If it's for an internal cost location, this is forwarded to the finance department, which bills the cost to the corresponding module. If the print is for private use, the user gets an automated bill at the end of the month with all the details of their prints. :::image src="https://cdn.simplyprint.io/i/landing/testimonials/schools/ost-university-3d-print-lab/simplyprint-dashboard.jpg" alt="The SimplyPrint dashboard on an ultrawide monitor at the OST 3D-Lab operator desk, showing printer status cards" caption="The lab runs on SimplyPrint - every print tied to a user and a cost-code, visible from one desk." ::: The mechanism is genuinely clever, and it leans on the [API](/features/api) to pull everything together at month-end. SSO is doing quiet work here too: because each person logs in with the same university account they use everywhere else, the bill always finds the right inbox. > The first point is the regex format control of the custom fields feature. This only allows SAP-codes with the right format - a first line of defence, so to speak. At the end of a month, we request all the relevant data via the SimplyPrint API. This gets processed with some Python scripts; we compare the SAP-codes to our whitelist to rule out typos and fantasy numbers. Everything which is internal use gets forwarded to the finance department so they can move the correct amount of money. All the prints marked private are handled separately: with the print data from SimplyPrint we compile an automatic invoice and send it with a payment link. Because the user has the same SSO login for SimplyPrint as for all the other university logins, we get the correct email address matched to the user. ## Half a day by hand, now 15 minutes a month Here is the number that makes the case. The old way wasn't just clunky; at the new scale it would be flatly impossible. Daniel is blunt about the before and after. > As only students from the mechanical-engineering department were able to print before, this was handled internally with the hair-saloon reservation tool. It was a completely manual process, copy-pasting into an Excel. This could have taken like half a day for a handful of prints. Now, with 400 prints or more per month and the ability to use the infrastructure for private prints too, a manual process would be completely impossible. For us it's just a few clicks with our scripts, a short check that things look right, and a whole bunch of emails get sent automatically. This takes maybe 15 minutes. Half a day for a handful of prints, then. About fifteen minutes for four hundred. That gap is the whole reason the lab could open to everyone without drowning the finance team. ## 30 minutes from "I want to print this" to a running print Billing fairly only matters if people can actually get a print going. The other half of opening the lab to 2,200 people was making the first print painless - no install, no manual, for someone who has never sliced anything in their life. That's the [Cloud Slicer](/features/slicer). > We have a separate Moodle site where users sign on - we use Moodle for all our teaching courses too. There they find all the relevant information for the 3D-Lab, including interactive manuals for first-time users, and they're guided through the initial SSO-login for SimplyPrint. For a first-time user the Cloud-Slicer is ideal for the first 3D-print of their life. Yes, there are limitations on the model, but we show in our manuals what can be printed and what can't. If the print is sliced without any warnings, it can be started on one of our printers and monitored via SimplyPrint throughout the printing process, until the user can take the finished model off the print plate. For bigger projects and advanced users we recommend OrcaSlicer. ## The honest part, and what's next Daniel didn't pitch it as flawless, which is exactly why it's believable. They came in early, and the relationship has matured. > We started with a closed beta version back in our testing phase in 2024. Let's just say I was sometimes hesitant to install the newest update right away - I'd wait a day and check the SimplyPrint Discord first. In those cases the support (aka Javad) was extremely fast and responsive, and bugs were fixed in no time at all. Today, in mid-2026, there are almost no such cases - just minor quality-of-life things. On the user side, I haven't had a complaint in a long time. With demand pushing the lab from eight printers to twelve, the setup is built to come along for the ride - the billing doesn't care whether it's reconciling forty prints or four hundred. ## TL;DR OST (Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences, Rapperswil-Jona) opened its 3D-Lab from a single-department service to all ~2,200 students and staff across 16 institutes. The hard part of a shared university lab is "who pays?" - and OST solved it by wiring the SimplyPrint API and custom fields into their SAP finance system. Before each print the user enters a SAP cost-code or marks it private; the cost auto-allocates to the right module, or the person gets an automated monthly bill. What once took half a day of copy-pasting into Excel for a handful of prints now takes about 15 minutes a month for 400+. With the Cloud Slicer, a complete beginner prints in about 30 minutes, nothing installed.