There is an old saying in the manufacturing industry, one more is worse than one less. For example, when printing a car for display, many complex parts are ‘scrambled’, and the cost may be more than buying a car by yourself. It is expensive, and the emergence of 3D printing provides these manufacturers with the opportunity to ‘break the ceiling’, integrate complex parts, save material and financial resources, and control costs.
Over the past decade, 3D printing has become a testing ground for manufacturers, with commercial applications limited to prototyping. But now, industrial-grade 3D printing has reached a tipping point and is about to become mainstream and trigger an economic revolution.
Really fast prototyping. For nearly two decades, 3D printing has been used to bring new parts or product designs to life. This process is often referred to as rapid prototyping, but it is often not fast, with service providers often taking a week or more to deliver a product. But recent breakthroughs in automation and the involvement of global couriers like UPS have changed everything, enabling same-day production and shipping in some cases. These changes are dramatically breaking the design cycle. Three or four design revisions during the prototyping stage, which used to take a month, now only takes a week. Products get to market faster, and businesses save a lot of time and money.
Rapid design iterations (A/B testing of physical products). 3D printing has scaled from prototyping to first-run production, enabling true market testing and rapid design iterations. Take Ford, for example. For most of the company’s history, if engineers wanted to test a prototype engine, they had to make entirely new molds. The process typically takes six months and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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Now, Ford can use 3D printing to produce molds in just 4 days and cost as little as $4,000. Given the dramatic reduction in time and cost, Ford recently decided not to build one prototype engine for a new car, but to test multiple prototype engines simultaneously. Engineers are no longer limited by old-fashioned industrial processes, and can explore and rigorously test dozens of design changes to improve engine performance.
Small batch production. According to the traditional production process, before the individual end parts can be put into production, the company must make the tool or mold. If the tooling costs $50,000 and it costs $0.50 per part to produce, the first part costs up to $50,000.50! If you make millions of parts, then this problem is solved, but what if you only make 500? 3D printing does not have any production preparation costs.
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Now, for low-volume production of less than 1,000 pieces, most companies look to 3D printing as a cost-saving alternative. Fast forward to the inevitable and not-so-distant future, when the cost of 3D printing production drops by 95 percent or more, and the “Made in China” label will become a collector’s item.
Mass customization. Before, if you wanted to have your knee replaced, the nurse would walk straight into the operating room with a box and the doctor would pick from five possible knee designs the one he thought most closely resembled yours. Today, your knee is scanned and a perfect replica is printed, ready for subsequent surgery. This is an example of mass customization. Mass customization is the mass production of one product, each of which is customized.
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Invisalign has built a multi-million dollar business using 3D printing to produce orthodontic devices, each of which is completely custom. Customization comes with a premium (like Starbucks skim mocha latte frappuccino vinni vicci), and nearly every company is exploring how to use product customization to better serve customers and increase profits.
Virtual inventory. When a manufacturing company produces a new product, it usually also produces a large number of spare parts in order to meet the demand for 10 years or more. But holding inventory comes at a high price. Costs include the cost of producing inventory, loss (parts lost or stolen), scrap, storage fees, insurance, tracking and distribution. What is your company’s storage fee? How many times per year are those parts needed? Why not print on demand? With 3D printing production, you can produce what you need, when and where you need it. Virtual inventory can help every company that uses manufactured goods become more efficient. Inventories around the world will soon be drastically reduced as virtual inventory becomes mainstream.
Parts long tail. 3D printing has not only upended the first few stages of production that build up multi-year inventories, it has also fundamentally changed how businesses view the end of a product’s life cycle. Now, a 10-year-old refrigerator with functioning machinery but missing two shelves or a seal is likely to be disposed of as scrap. After 10 years of service, all the parts produced for this refrigerator have been exhausted. The manufacturer would consider the product “dead” and no longer offer repairs. Not to mention the car, the car of the last century can only be scrapped now. But artist Florea’s 3D-printed pile of sac-like metal with Liu’s sense of movement blends seamlessly into a 1971 Ford Torino.
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But with 3D printing production, you now have a “long tail of parts”. As long as you keep the digital design files, you can print any part when you need it. Old products that are still useful do not become scrap, and their lifespan is not predetermined by the constraints of mass production. The “long tail” fundamentally changes the way designers and engineers think about and arrange product survival.
Production innovation renaissance. 3D printing has lower barriers to entry and enables more complex and useful objects, ushering in a new era of product innovation. The proliferation of design possibilities will eventually prompt incumbents to rethink almost every product in their hands. Companies are already replacing traditional production methods with 3D printing production in order to take advantage of its superior design capabilities and flexible production arrangements.
Using 3D printing to re-engineer the jet engine’s fuel injection system, reducing the number of parts from 21 to just one and incorporating geometries that would not have been possible with any other production method, greatly improving efficiency. This innovation renaissance is only going to get faster as businesses expand from redesigning existing products to creating new ones that are unimaginable today.
We are at a critical inflection point in history. The possibilities for growth and innovation are endless, and businesses have begun to embrace today’s possibilities. But 3D printing is currently to production what email was to Internet+ in 1994. The latter is an example of the amazing utility of new technology, but it is only the tip of the iceberg of sweeping changes.
