Epsilon3 2.0: The Next Chapter for Complex Hardware
Our vision for where Epsilon3 is headed and a few major announcements still to come over the next few weeks.
Complex hardware typically runs on systems that were each built for a different job. PLM holds the drawings. ERP keeps the books. MES runs the line. Not one of them was built for the work itself, the procedure that gets followed, the test that runs, the part that gets swapped, the decision that gets logged. So that work ends up where it always has: in spreadsheets, PDFs, binders, and one senior engineer's head.
We started Epsilon3 to give that work a centralized home. Five years and a hundred changelogs later, it runs a meaningful share of the country's most consequential hardware programs including roughly 30% of U.S. orbital launches, across 130+ organizations in space, defense, energy, and advanced manufacturing.
Today, we’re revealing our next step in the evolution of Epsilon3, and what you can expect over the coming months.
What this looks like in practice
Before we can talk about where we’re headed, let’s talk about what today looks like for many organizations grappling with the challenges of building, operating, and sustaining complex hardware.
A launch program. A government customer sets the requirements. A prime integrates the vehicle. Propulsion comes from one subcontractor, avionics from another, structures from a third, and each of those depends on suppliers below them. During an integrated test campaign, a supplier-provided component comes back out of spec. Now a non-conformance has to be dispositioned, and the people who need to weigh in sit in four different organizations. The sub exports a report to PDF. The prime's quality team re-keys it. The government waits for evidence assembled after the fact. Three days later there's a sign-off, and no single record anyone fully trusts. The thread the prime worked so hard to hold inside its walls snapped the moment the work crossed an org boundary, costing time, value, and most importantly, trust.
A production line. An energy-systems manufacturer is ramping from low-rate builds to high-rate production. Sales orders become work orders, parts flow in from a dozen vendors, inventory moves between two facilities on transfer orders, and quality escapes have to be caught before they ship. The executive who owns the program wants one question answered: where are we actually losing time? The honest answer is that nobody can see it, because the data lives across six tools and the only way to analyze it is to export it into a separate BI platform through complex custom integrations, where it goes stale and siloed to one team the moment it lands and stops being something the team controls.
A technician at the bench. On a commercial spacecraft line, an operator is midway through a build procedure when the hardware in front of them doesn't match the step: a bracket revision changed last week, but the instruction they're working from didn't. The engineer who'd know is on another shift. To hold schedule, they make the call they believe is right, jot it on the printout, and ping a lead on Slack. The unit moves on. The decision was sound, but it never became part of the record. Weeks later, when a test result comes back strange and the team tries to reconstruct what happened on that serial number, the answer lives in one printout, one Slack thread, and an operator's memory. The work got done. The proof that it got done right didn't, and the judgment that made it right walked off the floor at shift change.
Hardware companies have spent billions modernizing everything around the work. The work itself is the last unmodernized layer of the stack and it's the only layer where failure is existential. Across the programs we benchmark, teams lose on the order of 4,000 hours per organization per year to procedures run with the wrong tools.
That's the gap we’re solving for.
The vision: one platform for the full life of complex hardware
Epsilon3 exists to give that work a home. Our vision: bring together the capabilities that span the full life of complex hardware, the operator-essential core of categories like ERP, PLM, MES, QMS, CMMS, MRP, requirements and test management, parts and inventory, procurement and approvals, and plenty of work that was never given a clean category name at all, into a single platform.
We do this by being a heavier or lighter version of every system you already run, but by being the execution layer they were always missing, with four things the patchwork can't offer:
The best-of-breed essentials, in one place. Digital work instructions, real-time collaboration, version control, requirements and test traceability, non-conformance handling, BOM and inventory, procurement and approvals. We’ve built the operator-facing core of each of those domains, under one roof and one data model.
A simpler experience. One platform with a coherent UI, instead of a dozen tools, a dozen logins, and the cognitive tax of stitching them together in your head.
Interconnectivity without the integration tax. The links other stacks need integration projects, consultants, and customization debt to achieve are native with Epsilon3. We build for configuration, not custom builds.
Data you own and control, on one traceable thread. A consistent, traceable digital thread across the entire experience, from first article to final delivery — and the record stays yours, in the platform where the work actually happens, not exported into a tool you don't govern.
All of it born for the demands of aerospace, defense, space, and the other high-risk industries where the consequence of getting it wrong is real.
Teams that make the switch see it quickly: over the past 24 months, customers report up to 5× faster procedure authoring,, and 20–30% operational efficiency gains when they move off a disconnected patchwork onto one record.
"Every program I ran at SpaceX lived across a dozen systems and a hundred handoffs, and the thread between them was held together by people. That's the problem we set out to solve: give the work itself a home. The vision hasn't changed in five years, and it won't — one platform for the full life of complex hardware, built for the people actually doing the work. What's changing now is how far that thread can reach." — Laura Crabtree, CEO & Co-Founder
Where we're headed next: from connecting teams to connecting organizations
If the first five years were about connecting teams: closing the gaps between people, tools, and phases inside an organization. The next chapter is about connecting organizations.
Look again at that launch program. The reason the thread broke wasn't a missing feature. It was an org boundary. The prime, the subs, the suppliers, and the government customer were all executing against the same program, and none of them shared a record. Closing that gap, letting every organization that touches a program work from one governed, traceable execution record, is the direction everything we build now points toward.
This is not a novel problem, and there have been many attempts to address this through complex cloud environments and data sharing solutions. Many of these efforts are bogged down by data interoperability challenges, data ownership and governance questions, and manual process challenges. We’re taking a much more elegant, simple approach, with two-party manual consent at the core:
You own your data, you should control what is shared, whom it is shared with, and how it is shared in the platform and data format of your choice.
Sharing should be maximally beneficial, with the minimal amount of friction to ensure the right people have access to the right data, as decided by the right owners.
Sharing should be possible across boundaries and environments, without barriers for organizations and individuals to access information - if they’re supposed to see it.
We're organizing that build around four pillars:
Connectivity. Execution that crosses organizational boundaries, and a platform that reaches the systems you already run through deeper integrations and an open API. This is the heart of the next chapter - and it’s coming soon. More on that very soon.
Surfaces & Usability. Meet the work where it actually happens, whether on the console, on the floor, in the field, across shifts. Refreshed navigation and onboarding that shorten time-to-value, plus new ways to work including mobile, voice, and heads-up glasses display.
Scaled Operations. A platform that works for a prototype has to keep working at high-rate production. Deeper permissions and roles, program-level rollups, transfer and return orders, reference designators, and a rules engine so the system can enforce your process instead of relying on people to remember it, with the infrastructure behind the platform to scale usage, complexity, and deployment.
AI & Automation. AI is a tool, not a goal. We use it where it delivers a measurable result, including in faster procedure authoring, fewer execution errors, better recall of institutional knowledge. We're deliberately skeptical of features that exist only to be demoed or that don’t provide value on day one to our customers. Our customers do safety-critical work, so every action has to stay deterministic, auditable, and traceable, and your data has to stay yours end-to-end. That shapes the architecture: in the live execution loop, AI shows up as a recommendation, never an automation, because the cost of a hallucinated step in a real operation is unacceptable. It runs grounded in your own approved procedures and run history, and you can point your own model at your own data, in your own environment. And it's a two-way loop where every time an operator red-lines a procedure or logs a deviation, the system learns; in return it surfaces the recurring deviation, the drift in cycle time, the anomaly that looks like one from three programs ago, while the operator stays in the decision seat. The goal is to make a junior operator perform more like a senior one, and to keep a retiring engineer's judgment in the building after they've left.
What's next
The teams behind some of the most consequential hardware programs in the country, including names you know across space, defense, and energy, already run their execution on Epsilon3. The vision they bought into doesn't change with this chapter. It gets bigger: the same traceable thread, now reaching across every organization a program depends on, surfaced wherever the work happens, at the scale real programs demand, with intelligence that earns its place by running on a record they can trust.
You'll see multiple announcements from us over the next few weeks as we roll out the first of many new capabilities.
Our vision for what complex-hardware teams deserve has stayed constant for a hundred changelogs. Now we're building the next hundred toward it.
We’ll be hosting a webinar on June 18th at 11:30 a.m. PT/2:30 p.m. ET digging into Epsilon3 2.0 and our new major features. Register here.
Stay tuned.