What is Custom Production? A Comprehensive Guide to Mass Customisation with 3D Printing

For decades, companies have been utilising mass customisation for end products. While this allows them to use standardised processes and machinery to produce identical products in large quantities, it can be difficult to adapt quickly to changes in customer demand or market trends.

As manufacturers and brands move away from mass production, 3D printing is gaining traction as the best technology to use for custom manufacturing. 3D printing provides the ability to make very complex products accurately without costly tooling investments or setup fees.

This guide will explain custom manufacturing and production, how 3D printing technology can improve the process, and successful custom manufacturing created by 3D printing.

What is Mass Customisation and Manufacturing?

Mass customisation and manufacturing is the process of designing, engineering, and creating products that meet a customer's unique needs and specifications. Several industries are adopting custom production and manufacturing industries because customers are looking for products that aren't available off the shelf.

For example, in jewelery making, custom production allows customers to design their own pieces that are unique and tailored to their tastes. Similarly, in automotive manufacturing, custom production enables companies to produce cars with individualised features, such as body kits and upholstery designs, for a more personlised driving experience.

Mass Production vs. Mass Customisation

Unlike mass customisation, mass production involves producing large quantities of identical products using standardised processes and equipment. It's the process of producing identical products in large quantities using automated machinery, and it often requires costly investments in tooling and setup fees. Mass production is typically used for high volume products such as consumer electronics, appliances and other mass-market items.

Custom production focuses on producing unique products that meet the needs of individual customers or application. It involves a more flexible approach to manufacturing and prioritise customer satisfaction, even it it means sacrificing some efficiency.

Challenges of Mass Customisation and Custom Production

Mass customisation can be a complex and expensive process if you're not using the right technology.

Design Variability

When producing standardised products through mass production, manufacturers can use the same design for each product, which reduces costs and increases efficiency. In contrast, custom production requires manufacturers to create unique designs for each product they produce, which can be challenging and time-consuming.

Furthermore, design variability can also create challenges for supply chain management. With each product being unique, manufacturers may need to source different materials and components for each product, which can create inefficiencies and increase costs.

Efficiency

Custom production often requires a trade off between efficiency and quality. Mass production is designed to be efficient by producing large quantities of identical products quickly and at low cost. Custom production typically focuses on quality over quantity and customisation over speed.

Mass customisation requires more design, engineering, and quality control than mass production, which can also reduce efficiency. Also, with each product being unique, it can be challenging for the manufacturers to maintain consistent quality across multiple products. This need for quality control can further increase production time and costs, which can impact the overall efficiency of the custom production process.

Limited scalability, complexity, and lengthy lead times can also reduce the efficiency of custom production. Mass production relies on automation making it easier to scale up quickly and maintain consistent quality across products. In contrast, custom production could require manual processes that are harder to scale.

How to Use 3D Printing for Custom Production and Mass Customisation

Using additive manufacturing technology can mitigate the challenges that come with custom manufacturing. The best 3D printers can quickly and accurately create complex geometries with higher precision.

With greater flexibility, scalability, and accuracy, 3D printing can be used for a wide range of custom products.

Molds

Rapid tooling for injection molding can be used to create intricate shapes quickly and with high precision. Traditional mold making techniques involve creating a physical mold by carving or machining a block of material. This process can be time-consuming and expensive, expecially with the need to create multiple iterations of a mold.

With 3D printing, manufacturers can easily modify the design of the mold to meet the specific requirements, such as adding or removing features, changing the size, adjusting the shape, and increasing the production efficiency.

Casts

3D printing can also produce for casting quickly and more affordably than with tradtional manufacturing processes. This process involves printing a part with a 3D printer and casting it with a liquid metal or other materials, such as was or plastic.

Manufacturers can quickly produce complex shapes that are otherwise impossible to cast without expensive tooling, specialised equipment, and lots of time.

End-Products

3D printing can produce end-products that require intricate geometries and high quality surface finishes, especially with mSLA 3D printers. Manufacturers use mSLA 3D printers to mask the necessary pixels while printing and allow only the necessary pixels to pass light. The end result is a distortion free product with better surface finishes.

Producing with mSLA technology is even better when manufacturer use advanced technology like the Nexa3D's Lubricant Sublayer Photocuring (LSPc). This proprietary 3D printing technology combines UV light array and (LSPc) optical lens layer to ensure light uniformity in this process, which is essential for edge-to-edge performance with no distortions.

Mass Customisation & Custom Production Examples

Custom production is widely used in many industries, including automotive, aerospace, and medical. Here are some examples of custom manufacturing:

Dental Products

Dental products, from dentures to aligners, may be the most ubiquitous case of mass customisation on the market today. They must perfectly fit one's anatomy-requiring precise, accurate, and high quality molds safe for humans to wear. Therefore, the dental industry has turned to 3D printing to produce custom dentures, aligners, models, splints , impression trays, occlusal night guards and more.

A great example in Key Dental Technologies, a full digital laboratory supplying orthodontic clear aligners to MyOrthodontist, the largest network of family orthodontic practices in North Carolina.

In addition to offering a full range of braces and retainers to adults and teens, MyOrthodontist offers clear aligners most notably the FDA approved and patent pending clear aligner system, MyClearALIGN!, that was made possible by the NXD 200.

The NXD 200 allows them to produce 20 models every thirty minutes but with incredible accuracy, quality and fine details that other 3D printers weren't able to achieve.

Prosthetics

Medical professionals have been creating custom prosthetics with 3D printing technology since 2011. Medical-grade, biocompatible 3D printing materials can copy the actual anatomy of the human body and provide users the ability to walk, share high fives, and give a thumbs up.

Charity LifeNabled, which provides free clinics and prosthetics in northern Guatemala, created a fully digital process to produce customised 3D prosthetic sockets with flexible inner liners. The team generated the prosthetic socket designs digitally and 3D printed them with TPU materials. The new digital process cut the team's production time from more than three days to several hours.

Consumer Products

PepsiCo uses the NXE 400 3D printer with xPEEK147 material for various aspects of the bottle development. The company uses 3D printing technology to produce more than 10,000 bottles and compress its prototype tooling developmenttime form 4 weeks to 48 hours.

Applied Rapid Technologies (ART) is another company benefitting from 3D printing technology for casting. After years of facing challenges with Urethane casting parts, ART now uses the NXE 400Pro to print over 25 pieces of custom mold and jigs and fixtures in an hour this allows the firm to deliver mold and jigs parts on-demand and with superior quality in a fraction of the time it would take to produce them using traditional methods.

Benefits of Using 3D Printing for Custom Production and Manufacturing

The advantages of 3D printing for custom production and manufacturing are numerous. Here are some key benefits:

Flexibility

3D printing offers manufacturers great when it comes to product design. They can quickly and easily customise the components to meet customer demands with minimal effort.

Cost Optimisation

Custom production using 3D printing requires less time and labour, reducing costs compared to traditional methods. This allows manufacturers to save both time and money when producing customised parts. The biggest cost savings is actually associated with not having to manufacture a minimum order quantity in order to get the price down, thereby not needing to carry a lot of inventory. Mass customisation requires lower quantities and those lower quantities are not effective to be produced in mass.

Speed

The speed of 3D printing allows manufacturers to quickly and efficiently produce custom components with high accuracy. This reduces lead times significantly, enabling them to meet customer demands promptly.

Use the Best 3D Printers for Custom Production and Mass Customisation

3D printing technology allows production to move from days or weeks of development time to hours or minutes. Businesses can faster design cycles, a quicker time to market, and more flexibility-all while customising products to their customer's needs.

Nexa3D is the leading provider of 3D printing solutions for the custom production and manufacturing industry. WIth an array of ultra fast 3D printers and superior Lubricant Sublayer Photo Curing (LCPc) 3D printing technology, manufacturers can produce high-quality components and end-use products in a fraction of the time compared to other popular 3D printers.

For more information on NEXA 3D MACHINES, please feel free to contact our local Dynagraph representative.