Revolutionizing Supply Chains: Unleashing the Invisible Power of Metal Additive Manufacturing

The Obvious:

When it comes to new technologies, it's only natural to be captivated by the visible and exciting aspects. Engineers tend to focus on exciting design potential and the product enhancements they enable. However, the true value of metal additive manufacturing (AM) lies in an often-overlooked characteristic that has the power to revolutionize how supply chains work. In this article, we will explore the invisible advantage of AM, which should be a source of excitement for strategic thinkers and procurement buyers.

The Challenge of Material Characteristics:

With casting & forging, each supplier has their own unique process, which results in microstructures and mechanical properties that differ even when producing similarly shaped parts. Similar to casting or forging, the material characteristics of the final AM product depend on the specific processing of the part. To ensure confidence in the production route, it is therefore essential to demonstrate that the specific part's processing is robust, well controlled, and statistically repeatable. This is especially important in industries such as Aerospace, with stringent product certification requirements. The advantage of all of these manufacturing processes in terms of reduced material waste and enabling more complex products, therefore comes at a significant price in terms of the up-front cost of material, process and part qualification.

The Monopoly Effect:

Historically, customers of products manufactured through casting, forging, or fabrication have faced a challenging dilemma. Once a supplier is qualified to produce a specific part using these processes, they establish an effective monopoly. This benefits the supplier but is detrimental to the customer, particularly when dealing with long-term contracts. As a customer you can own the tooling and IP on paper, but in practice the cost and complexity of transferring this to a new supplier and qualifying them creates a significant barrier to competition and multi-sourcing.

Recurring costs tend to escalate at every opportunity for contract re-negotiations because suppliers are aware that replacing them with competitors will incur substantial non-recurring costs and risks. This situation arises due to the inherent "witchcraft" nature of casting and forging processes. It is ‘sticky’ and hard to re-allocate the business, and they know it.

The Potential of Additive Manufacturing:

While AM initially faces similar challenges in terms of part variation among different suppliers, unlike traditional technologies it has the potential to overcome these obstacles and avoid the monopoly just described.

The key lies in qualifying the AM process and then creating a prescriptive specification that meticulously controls the part-specific aspects of the AM process (such as orientation, support, scan vectors, and parameters applied).

With AM the transfer of such IP between suppliers is much easier because the critical parameters which influence the material properties are stored in a digital file and controlled by machines which can be purchased on the open market. The ‘witchcraft’ can’t be hidden because it must be communicated to the machine. It also doesn’t stop working when ‘Old Fred’ retires and no-one knows how many times to spin the chicken and stomp on the tea leaves before lighting the furnace.

Of course, for this approach to work, the customer needs to own the IP contained in the prescriptive specification, or at least the rights to transfer it. And in practice that requires a customer who is very competent in controlling that specification and has the ability to demonstrate to the certification authorities that the transfer of this prescriptive specification between machines and suppliers is valid and adequately controlled.

Unveiling the Invisible Advantage:

To fully embrace this invisible advantage of AM, strategic thinkers and procurement buyers must first recognize the opportunity that exists to eliminate supplier monopolies, reduce non-recurring costs, and open the doors to healthy competition. They need to view the prescriptive specification as something of value and adapt their procurement strategy accordingly. There are lots of people working on blockchains and encryption of build files for just this kind of purpose, but today the barrier isn’t the lack of those technical things. It is simply that the buyer needs to understand the benefit of operating in this way, and needs to develop the technical competency to specify in the prescriptive way necessary to do so.

Too Many Cooks:

If I want my favourite dish, I need to go the restaurant that makes it.

If somehow, I get hold of the recipe and I give it to another chef, I will get a different dish. Another chef will interpret the recipe differently, as recipes written for humans are not very specific.

But imagine in the future, that my local restaurant uses a robotic chef. Now if I can get hold of the code that the robotic chef uses, and I can buy an identical robotic chef, I’ll be able to make that dish the same at home, or at another restaurant. The differences now will be limited to the quality of the ingredients, which can of course be specified and controlled.

The ‘witchcraft’ of the chef is taken away once it can be coded for a robot, because now it must be a prescriptive specification with no room for interpretation.

Casting & forging have ‘recipes’, but still rely heavily on the human ‘chef’. AM is the robotic chef, and I think we can agree that it changes the game somewhat.

The problem today is that there are plenty of ‘robot chefs’ out there, but the customers are providing each of them with a human recipe. On the supplier side there is a human interpreting the recipe to code the robot chef, and it should come as no surprise that the results can therefore be inconsistent between suppliers. The problem is not that the robot chefs are inconsistent, the problem is that the humans interpreting the recipe are. The customer is using a human recipe to convey to several other humans what is wanted from a robot.

If instead we give the human recipe to one human and ask them to code the robot chef, and then provide that same code to ten robots, we will get the interpretation of one human, and consistent results from all the ten robots.

If you want consistency and a choice of suppliers, then choose a single human chef, ask them to write the code for the robot chef, and then find people with lots of robot chefs and ask them to cook precisely what you want, and compete them against one another.

Did I mention that APWORKS can be your human chef for such a purpose?