Big Trains, Tiny Things, SMB Sentiment, and AP Style

Happy Friday and welcome to issue 2 of the Industrial Innovation Advocate, a newsletter focused on advancing industrial and supply chain technologies and how marketing and communications can help. As always, let me know how I can help you!

Additive Manufacturing's Promise for the Rail Industry

The rail industry is ideal for a lot of the benefits that additive manufacturing brings to bear, similar to the aerospace industry:

• Low production volumes eliminate many of the cost-per-part advantages of traditional manufacturing methods.
• Long-lived physical assets will go through cycles of spare part needs for decades.
• A regulated industry means meeting flame-smoke-toxicity (FST) requirements, and rail companies have a financial and service incentive to get trains back on the tracks quickly.

3D ADEPT (3DA) organized a great conversation on the topic earlier this week online, with an impressive line-up: Deutsche Bahn's Stefanie Brickwede (she is also Managing Director for MGA Mobility | MGA Medical - Mobility goes Additive e.V. ), Siemens Mobility's Christian Ochs, and Würth Additive Group's AJ Strandquist.

At the Additive Manufacturing Strategies Conference earlier this year in New York, the U.S. Navy's Matthew Sermon said they have a goal to have 10% 3D-printed parts (primarily metal) in their nuclear submarines. Similarly, Brickwede says DB's expectation in the tenders it issues is for 10% of the parts to be 3D-printable. Essentially that's 10% of 1.2 billion euros/year in rolling stock spare parts for them. That means at the production stage either choosing to 3D print right away or designing parts for both traditional and additive even if AM is not the route for serial production.

Ochs notes that while they design trains for 30 years of usage, they are often in use much longer - he's seen 70 years. Needless to say, no digital files. Also, as Strandquist notes, the longer the life of these systems, the smaller the upfront cost of a production part contributes to the overall life cost. In other words, while traditionally manufactured parts might win initially in cost per part, years of spare parts replacement can completely change that equation, and it's that cost-effectiveness and flexibility that concerns DB. Plus, the original manufacturers have a way of disappearing through the years.

Take a look at Siemens Mobility's Rail Service Center for the scale of their operations, which extensively use systems from my former employer, Stratasys .

Xometry Survey Gains Mainstream Attention

Surveys have long been a popular PR technique. Gaining mainstream attention for them - especially mainstream media attention - means doing them properly, with a reputable firm and polling best practices. It's an investment, especially when you're polling B2B audience segments. Xometry has been working with such a firm on a quarterly basis and earned Reuters coverage with the most recent one - not easy to land.

John Zogby Strategies surveyed 150 small and midsized manufacturers, with 88% agreeing that the health of American manufacturing depends on reshoring in the most recent poll. Nearly 80% say they have already successfully reshored or are undergoing plans to reshore all or portions of their operations to further insulate their companies from macroeconomic and geopolitical disruptions.?

CEO Randy Altschuler ran for Congress as a Republican, which means he brings a unique understanding to how to talk about industrial policy, yet he is coming at it in a bipartisan manner, given many of the policies discussed in the survey came from the Biden administration. Getting Reuters to cover your survey means you executed the survey to a high standard. I particularly appreciate the focus on small-to-midsized manufacturers, who are the ones that need the most guidance and support to make advanced manufacturing investments stateside. #digitalmanufacturing #onshoring

Making a Big Deal About Tiny Things

I had the opportunity to check out some impressive Boston Micro Fabrication - BMF #3dprinting technology in action at the Parvus 3D, LLC "Builds and Brews" event last week in Eden Prairie, Minn. (which also showcased tasty beers from former Stratasys exec Patrick Carey's Padraigs Brewing). Parvus has 2, 10 and 25-micron BMF machines, well-engineered and with tightly integrated software, in an extremely clean and well-run pair of shipping containers they have turned into a lab. Yes, looking to expand.

Needless to say, printing accurate parts with tolerances this small benefits from expertise and meticulous attention to process, which is why the BMF team sends work from all across the country to Parvus. Director of Business Development and Engineering Sheila (Vaziri) Ziobro runs things really well over there. The smaller and more complex the part, the more it makes sense to consider #additivemanufacturing. In fact, the alternative for some of these parts being produced with BMF technology is to not produce them at all. Think applications like microfluidics and precision connectors for instance. It's the kind of set-up that should benefit the large medical device development community in the Twin Cities.

Thanks for opening your doors last week Parvus team!

New AP Stylebook and Why We Care

The latest edition of the AP Stylebook comes out in a few weeks (anyone can buy it). Why do we care? AP style is generally the gold standard for writing in public relations, particularly for editorial writing like press releases. We want to make it as easy as possible for media to cover our announcements and use our content, so it helps to conform to the AP Stylebook as much as possible. It's why I'm always replacing colorful words like "exclaimed," "offered," or "declared" in quotes with the comparatively bland "said." It's neutral, which is what we're going for. Here are a few changes to in the upcoming Stylebook you might find interesting or useful:

• The preferred dictionary is Merriam-Webster. That means it's the default for anything not specifically in the Stylebook.
• Minimize writing "tweet," when referencing the platform now called "X" and previously known as Twitter. The preferred word is "post."
• When using bullets, only use periods for complete sentences, not for single words or phrases.

And here's one tech-PR-specific ask from me, not in the Stylebook: Avoid saying your new product is "revolutionary." Is it really? Any improvement to an existing technology almost certainly isn't, and its usage creates much eye-rolling among members of the media, financial analysts, and other audiences. We don't need the hyperbolic adjectives.

That's all for this issue. Can I help you with your manufacturing and supply chain tech marketing and communications? Visit www.pearsonconsulting.co