Unsolicited Additive Advice – An AM Perspective (Part 7)

If you are reading this, you’ve either stumbled on to the last post first or you enjoyed something in the previous six that brought you back.?To finish out this series, I want to pull several of the threads from these posts together and summarize my high level advice to the additive industry, from a relatively knowledgeable outsider.?For some, this will be obvious, but worth hearing again.?For others, this may not be intuitive, but it is based on some painful lessons learned.

Play to your strengths

There are industries with values that align well to the core values of additive, and there are industries that don’t.?Aerospace and Defense is a perfect match for AM for reasons I’ve covered ad nauseum – light weighting and low volume economics.?OEMs (and their suppliers) should be cranking small parts out of powderbed machines around the clock.?Larger parts, higher requirement parts, and spare/replacement parts for MRO/sustainment should be keeping fleets of FDM machines busy.?Medical and Dental industries also have great matches with low volume economics down to individual patient-specific prints.?Consumer products, I don’t know.?Prototpying, yes.?Tooling, maybe.?But production??You’ve got a great process, should you really be making grape jam in a microwave (really, the analogy makes sense, see Part 3)?

So, if you have the technology, the materials, and people with the vertical-specific knowledge for a well-aligned industry.?Focus there.?If not, build that. Build strength on strength and engage a willing and collaborative customer (and, if you are able, I don’t know that there is a more willing customer than the US Defense industry right now).

Focus on the gaps and the hard-to-manufacture

If you have a good way to make something, leave it alone.?Don’t print what you can mold, unless you only need a few, or you need it tomorrow.?Instead, solve a problem.?Address a manufacturing issue.?Satellite manufacturers have started printing titanium mounting brackets because they needed strong and light titanium but were machining 90% or more of the mass off of a stock shape.?Rocket engines were so complex and expensive to produce that we nearly shuttered the industry in the 90s while buying engines from Russia.?Out of necessity, we found ways to make those engines radically less expensive by printing them.?There are plenty of similar opportunities out there still today.?Talk to a manufacturing engineer.?Learn what it takes to make a complex composite part like an engine nacelle inner barrel acoustic liner, or any composite or hybrid part, or a wiring harness.?Hard-to-manufacture is a motivator.?Look for it. Solve a problem. There are easy problems to solve and there are hard ones. There's money to be made in both, and worlds to revolutionize solving the hard ones (see Part 6).

Look also for the gaps.?There are airlines that are forced to spend tens of thousands on an assembly when they really only need one part that breaks frequently.?The supplier only sells the assembly and the airline has no other option.?With 3d printing (and someone knowledgeable in part certification), can that gap be addressed??Absolutely, and there are people who can help (see Part 5).

What about an even more "out-there" one??People will be living and working on the moon and Mars in our life time.?There has never been a clearer case for the value of 3d printing, and the number of companies seriously working on that topic can be counted on my left hand.

But if we only target the challenges, aren’t we setting ourselves up to fail, or spend years investing without return??No. Not if you create and work a plan that moves you in meaningful steps and allows for course correction.?For a good portion of my time at Stratasys , my mantra was: Identify barriers to adoption and eliminate them.?A step-wise plan starts with that simple thought (See Part 1).

View the whole picture

This one should be painfully obvious, but I still saw case after case where putting it into practice continues to be a struggle.?3d printed production parts cannot be compared one-for-one with a traditionally manufactured alternative unless you have full accounting for all tooling and operations costs.?I found repeatedly that many traditional manufacturing costs are lost in overhead and fail to be appropriately accounted for in a part cost comparison.?Get away from tooling and production and it’s even easier to lose those comparative costs, because often lifecycle costs are borne by someone else in the supply chain altogether.?What does it cost to stock a rarely used spare part at a remote warehouse in Southeast Asia??Does the OEM of that part have any idea??Do they care??They might if digital supply can become a selling point to their customer.

Perhaps the trickiest business case problem I’ve seen though, is the part-by-part analysis.?I was working with a company I won’t name.?They had negotiated a discount that should have been mutually beneficial, and very much in line with traditional manufacturing – a volume based discount.?Yet parts are designed by different engineers across an organization.?So each engineer would price out 3d printing for their part.?They’d use current pricing and savings wouldn’t be enough to justify switching to additive.?At the same time, literally hundreds of engineers were doing the same thing for their part at the same time.?If they had known about each other and the sliding scale on volume pricing would be applied to the aggregated opportunity, very quickly they would have had many more parts trading to additive.?This in turn would have made future analysis even easier, and low and behold, adoption starts to follow that hockey stick curve our investors simultaneously demand and are skeptical of.

The view has to be holistic.

The End

This series of blog posts has been me talking, but I know what I know because of many long years of listening.?I hope you gained something from any time you spent reading those, and I’d be very interested in discussing these topics further. Please contact me here on LinkedIn.

#3dprinting?#additivemanufacturing?#aerospace?#defense?#aerospaceanddefense

Past Posts:

• Part 1 – Am I an Additive Manufacturing outsider yet?
• Part 2 – Where’s the real value in additive?
• Part 3 – Mass production or just production of mass?
• Part 4 – Polymer or Metal??Yes, please.
• Part 5 – The right type of supplier.
• Part 6 – Where does it go from here?