Why 3D Printing Service Bureaus Must Automate

With all the business interest in 3D printing, the demand for service bureau work is increasing. Many will soon experience growing pains. To fully capitalize on their opportunity, service bureaus and others who provide 3D printing services will need to automate their workflow – especially with front end activities like quoting, order entry, and customer service.

I’ve seen estimates which suggest that globally, there may be more than 1,200 3D printing service bureaus. Some even say as many as 5,000. I’m not sure how accurate those numbers are, because they’re probably lumping makerspaces, fab labs and in-plant shops into that mix.

These diverse types of facilities all have customers. With service bureaus, those customers are external. In other cases, most or all of those customers are internal.

Some of the work from those customers is predictable. In an educational environment, the work submitted by students is typically assigned. In an industrial setting, things are a little more fluid, but you can still exert some control. Companies can define software tools and put standards in place for how files should be created and submitted to an internal shop. In addition, they can apply budgetary constraints and require staff to forecast their needs. 

Drinking From a Fire Hose

Control is a luxury most service bureaus don’t have. When they’re ramping up, they typically endure periods of feast and famine. They go out and sell their service, get busy, stop selling and then run out of work.

If a service bureau is able to survive the startup phase, or gets lucky and falls into the right markets, volume builds. At that point it can be like drinking from a fire hose. Work comes at them from many different directions and it all has to be processed, produced and shipped.

Compounding this problem is the fact that the industry is moving from prototyping into production. Prototypes are high margin orders. With 3D printing, production is typically lower volume and requires quick turn. This creates a lot of small orders instead of fewer bigger orders. As I’ve mentioned before, the transaction cost that goes along with each order is fixed. It can cost the same amount of money to move a $50 order through your facility as it does a $5,000 order.

History Repeats

I’m sure that sometimes I seem like a broken record when I write about this, but print shops in the 2D industry dealt with many of the same problems. To remain competitive, they needed to become more efficient to handle the growing volume of smaller orders and they also had to drive transaction cost out of their businesses.

Labor is finite. There is only so much each person can do. As the number of monthly orders continued to rise, shops were forced to hire more people to manage them. But most of the time they’d lag behind the curve. They’d only add another body when backs were ready to break. The customer service manager would go to the owner and let them know of an impending mutiny. Eventually the owner would authorize another hire.

Then, when the natural ebbs and flows of business hit, the layoffs would start. If a company lost a big customer, several people might be impacted.

The Ah-Ha Moment

I’m telling you now that the same thing is likely to happen with 3D printing. Service bureaus will decide that it’s cheaper to solve workflow problems with labor than it is with technology. This will hamper their growth and create a lot of overworked, stressed out employees. Things will get even worse when they hit a lull.

The problem will eventually become so acute that companies will finally decide to act. They’ll have the proverbial “ah-ha” moment when the problem becomes obvious:

“Our workflow is so constrained that it’s causing customer and employee dissatisfaction, in addition to hampering our growth.”

Web-To-3D Print Software

With the problem defined, they can finally begin work on a solution. Technology becomes the logical answer. 

As the 3D printing industry has grown, entrepreneurs and larger companies have gone beyond machines and materials. They’re finally creating software that improves productivity by automating workflow.

Web-to-3D print (W23DP) software is available to help companies manage estimating, order entry and a host of other tasks.

The implications can be profound. In a university setting, W23DP software can allow fab labs to manage the large influx of jobs they receive at the end of each semester. In an internal center, it can allow companies to better handle key points in the product development lifecycle. For service bureaus it can allow them to scale up their capacity and better plan future investments in hardware...

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