<p> This article is part of a series of articles discussing various topics surrounding the 3D printing of spare parts in industries with significant manufacturing footprints, such as production lines and multiple production lines across multiple locations. You can read up on past articles: 3D Printing: A Game of Trading Liabilities where we explore the risks and liabilities of adopting 3D printing as a means of spare part production, in a production line setting 3D Printing: Manpower implications where we explore the manpower requirements, and associated roles and responsibilities, for a successful digital transformation of a spare-part supply chain. In this third article we explore the various aspects surrounding open material 3D printers and how they can be leveraged in an industrial context, say to produce spare parts, tooling or production parts, to create, enable or unlock sustainable value to the organisations that deploy them. Open-Hardware vs Open-Material Before digging a bit deeper, let?s distinguish open-hardware from open-material printers. Open-Hardware Open-hardware refer primarily to machines that do not have any proprietary components in them, where their source-code & design of everything in their bill of material is openly available to be used by others to create, customise and innovate. Open-Material Open-material refers primarily to the printer?s ability to print with any material, regardless of its manufacturer. It is to note that the open-hardwareness of a printing technology has very little bearing on whether the technologies has the ability to be open-material or not. Why are materials such a big deal? Fact: the total addressable additive manufacturing market is directly proportional to the availability of qualified materials. In other words, as more materials are being made 3D printable, the more applications these 3D printers can deliver on, in turn, the greater the 3D printing impact on organisations can be. The OEM battlefield When organisations we are considering leveraging 3D printing in the context of industrial applications, printer reliability and part repeatability is an expectation that every OEM must be able to deliver on if they wish to have a seat at the table. Enter the proprietary materials OEMs know this battle very well, and are developing their printers along specific application verticals, where their objective is to create a finely tuned 3D printer that is able to excel in the delivery of these very specific applications, in a way that no other 3D printer is able to achieve, or compete on, securing and protecting their market share all while creating true value for their customers. To do so, OEMs must have end-to-end understanding and control of all variables in the printing process, which includes materials. The aim of proprietary materials is to specifically enable them to deliver on this expected reliability and repeatability, to place them in a position to deliver, out-of-the-box and with no guesswork or witchcraft, the ability to deliver on these specific applications. Consequently the strength of an OEM?s value proposition is often tied to its material portfolio, the repeatability of its printed parts and their ability to deliver value on a specific application? out of the box. This said, if we lived in an exclusively proprietary material 3D printer world, not only would organisations would need P printers to deliver on the M materials it needs, they would also need to wait for these printer OEMs to create these M materials, and possibly develop these A applications. Enter the 3rd party materials Sadly, no matter how many proprietary materials each OEM is able to offer, there will never be enough to address the needs of every application, nor will these OEMs ever be fast enough to develop them. As such, some OEMs have adopted an open material strategy as a solution to deliver a value proposition to applications requiring niche, specialised or low-volume materials. This open material strategy, effectively decouples their ability to develop these materials, from their printers ability to print them and to deliver value on those applications. In turn, enabling them to gain access to a wider market share without the need to actively invest in material R&D or application development. Hence why open-material 3D printers are so disruptive, p of P printers capable of printing M materials, reducing an organisation the capital expenditure and technological footprint without compromising on impact, all while providing them the flexibility to on-board new materials to create, unlock and enable new value. Is it really this simple? In a sense, yes, 3D printers use raw-materials as input, and if one can find another raw-material ?that fits the same hole?, why not? However the reality is a bit more complicated, as each material behaves differently, melts differently, cools differently, shrinks differently, binds differently, etc, etc, establishing true machine-material compatibility is key challenge to overcome to unlock the full impact of additive manufacturing technologies. From manufacturing unit to materials printing platform From an OEM perspective, creating a 3D printer optimised to deliver reliability and repeatability on a specific material for a specific application is ?easy?, while creating a 3D printer sufficiently flexible to reliably and repeatedly print with unknown materials of unknown origin and questionable quality for delivering on unknown applications is ?more difficult?. In fact, creating a material agnostic 3D printer is, for many OEMs, nightmarish; as not only do they need to develop the software and firmware that provides configuration access to all parameters for preparing and controlling the print process, but develop a printing platform that can meet the range of print requirements needed to print any material, whether they be currently known or unknown; all while putting their reliability & repeatability reputation in the hands of 3rd party material manufacturers and the printer operator?s ability to successfully print with them. In the customer hands From the customer point of view, open material printers can be extremely compelling, as it frees them from the shackles binding them to the limitations and conditions of a specific OEM, similar to why an organisation would want to start manufacturing their own spare parts. Similarly to producing their own spare parts, organisations trading their proprietary material 3D printers for open-material 3D printers, also shift the responsibility for machine-material compatibility, printer reliability and part repeatability to themselves. A decision that could either create, enable or unlock value, or introduce risk and liabilities that outweigh the application's benefits (as discussed here). Making it work It is without a doubt that opening up material restrictions on 3D printing technologies is key for the development of new applications, advancement of the industry and the widening of its addressable market. It?s all about support The reality of delivering machine-material compatibility, printer reliability and part repeatability is a question of support, and support is a financial question. Where the questions are Does it make financial sense for an OEM to provide technical & application support to customers and take on the liability of using materials of unknown origin or questionable quality? Does it make financial sense for a material manufacturer to provide technical & application support to customers to customers and take on the liability of using 3D printers of unknown origin or questionable quality? Sadly, the answer is NO for all of these questions, it doesn?t make any financial sense for one company to take over the risks and liabilities associated with the use of another company?s products; nor would be a realistic undertaking: there are simply too many materials and too many printers. Unfortunately, this hot-potato reality is too often forced on to the customers, exposing them to potential risks and liabilities, and with an increased burden in creating, enabling or unlocking value in their organisation. Enter the integrators In order for organisations to fully benefit from an open material market, a new class of industry player needs to be introduced: integrators, independently incentivised individuals, or organisations, tasked with ensuring machine-material compatibility and taking on the risks, and liabilities, of printer reliability and part repeatability. Much like within IT, where organisations rely on system integration specialists to ?make sure all the IT boxes talk to one another?, customers looking to reap the benefits of an open material market must also consider the necessity of machine-material integration specialists, either as a non recurring engineering (NRE) project or as sustained effort. Whether these integration specialists stem from public organisations, such as universities & government agencies, from the private sector in the form of turn-key services offered by engineering consultants, printer or material resellers, or developed as an internal capability within an organisation?s 3D printing task force (as discussed here); their existence is an absolute necessity to empower an open material market, to create, enable or unlock new applications, that will drive value in organisations and push for the advancement of 3D printing as a commercially viable and sustainable means of manufacturing. Need help figuring out your material needs or strategy? Feel free to reach out, I'd be more than happy to discuss the intricacies of your digital transformation initiatives and provide you with a new perspective, and perhaps even a solution. Stay Tuned for more! The following article will discuss the availability, need and requirements for a part database, also known as a virtual warehouse. Be sure to like and follow to ensure that you won't miss it! About The Kre8 Group The Kre8 Group is a global consultancy group, with offices and manpower in Canada, Hong-Kong, Singapore and Switzerland, focused entirely on facilitating sustainable 3D printing business strategies, technology adoption, application development and the business models, the production & operation workflows and processes that support it. </p>

<p> This article is a follow up to 3D Printing: A Game of Trading Liabilities, where we explore the risks and liabilities of adopting 3D printing as a means of spare part production, in a production line setting. In this second article, we will explore the impact of 3D printing on manpower, more specifically on the roles and responsibilities of individual employees on the line. If you haven?t read this first one, I suggest you do so first, as it might give a bit more context to the examples and scenarios. The Industrialisation of 3D printing 3D printing is not new, it?s been around for more than 30 years; this said, for the first 25 of these years, 3D printers were daunting and complex machines far out of reach of the non-experts. Now we live in a world where 3D printers are surprisingly easy to use, with adequate training. Most organisations discover 3D printing through prototyping, either as a service or as an in-house capability, positioned as an engineering and design tool to be used by individuals with previous experience in manufacturing and design for manufacturing. Making adoption simple, seamless and with direct impact and noticeable benefits to organisations. However, when organisations decide to roll-out 3D printing on a wider scale, placing it in the hands of line workers and administrators, manpower implications and ramifications are far more complex than advertised. For an organisation to successfully execute their 3D printing digital transformation, truly lies in their ability onboard the right talent to the workforce, or up-skill their line workers and administrators to make them active participants in this 3D printing revolution, adapt their skills, transform their roles to thrive in this new in-house manufacturing - supply chain paradigm. The status quo In an historical context, both line operators and line engineers share in the responsibility of identifying wear and breakage on their line, deciding to replace parts preventatively, on breakage or when a certain wear threshold is met; and this across thousands of parts, each with their own design version, revision and quality standard for safe use. In this reality, when an employee identifies a need for a part, said part is either pulled from the warehouse or obtained through procurement / purchasing. Granted, the process might be painfully slow, officious and make the production line stop for longer than it should, however the task requires 15 minutes of administrative work for the line engineer, or line operator, in question, and said employee has since returned to work to create direct value for the organisation (in the sense of direct and indirect costs). Making the change The core objective of the 3D printed spare part strategy, is to eliminate the involvement of procurement in the resupply of these parts, and to simply 3D print them on premise instead; effectively minimising lead-time and maximising line uptime, and consequently adjusting the sourcing procedures to accommodate this new paradigm. When planning this new sourcing procedure, the 3D-print-readiness of a spare part catalogue needs to be taken into consideration, where we can imagine each individual spare part would fall in one of the following four categories: (from best to worst): A ready-to-print build file is available: where everything is available employee only needs to press print (best case scenario) A qualified STL/CAD is available: where a part has been designed, proven to work, and employee only needs to prepare the build file and print. An unqualified STL/CAD is available: where a part has been designed, but is not proven to work, and employee needs to prepare the build file and print, test and redesign & reprint if needed. A STL/CAD is unavailable: where nothing is there and the employee needs to do everything from scratch (worst case scenario) In practice In this new 3D printing reality, the historical part request procedure (the status quo) is also revised for each of these readiness levels, such as: A ready-to-print build file is available: where when an employee identifies a need for a part, looks in a database of available 3D parts, downloads the ready to print build file, loads it onto the printer, prepares the printer (load material, cleans and what-not) and start the print and goes back to work. Some time later, the part finishes printing, the employee unloads the part, post-process it, un-prepares the printer (unload material, clean and what-not), tests the parts. If it meets the functional requirements does what needs to be done with the part and goes back to work, otherwise reprints (recursively until a qualifying part can be printed) does what needs to be done with the part and goes back to work. A qualified STL/CAD is available: where when an employee identifies a need for a part, looks in the database of available 3D parts, loads the STL onto the build preparation software, selects the settings and adjusts the parameters, outputs the build file, loads the build file onto the printer, prepares the printer (load material, cleans and what-not) and start the print and goes back to work. Some time later, the part finishes printing, the employee unloads the part, post-process it, un-prepares the printer (unload material, clean and what-not), tests the parts. If it meets the functional requirements does what needs to be done with the part and goes back to work, alternatively the employee adjusts the print parameters and reprints (recursively until a qualifying part can be printed) does what needs to be done with the part and goes back to work. An unqualified STL/CAD is available: where when an employee identifies a need for a part, looks in the database of available 3D parts, loads the STL onto the build preparation software, selects the settings and adjusts the parameters, outputs the build file, loads the build file onto the printer, prepares the printer (load material, cleans and what-not) and start the print and goes back to work. Some time later, the part finishes printing, the employee unloads the part, post-process it, un-prepares the printer (unload material, clean and what-not), tests the parts. If it meets the functional requirements does what needs to be done with the part and goes back to work, alternatively the employee adjusts the design, redesign and/or print parameters and reprints (recursively until a qualifying part can be printed) does what needs to be done with the part and goes back to work. A STL/CAD is unavailable: where when an employee identifies a need for a part, defines the part?s requirements, designs the replacement part, exports the STL, loads the STL onto the build preparation software, selects the settings and adjusts the parameters, outputs the build file, loads the build file onto the printer, prepares the printer (load material, cleans and what-not) and start the print and goes back to work. Some time later, the part finishes printing, the employee unloads the part, post-process it, un-prepares the printer (unload material, clean and what-not), tests the parts. If it meets the functional requirements does what needs to be done with the part and goes back to work, alternatively the employee adjusts the design, redesign and/or print parameters and reprints (recursively until a qualifying part can be printed) does what needs to be done with the part and goes back to work. The reality for most organisation will be a mix of all four scenarios, where after a certain amount of effort, and time, the best case scenario can be executed in the majority of the part demand cases; effectively bringing the employee workflow closer to the process experienced by employees in organisations with a traditional supply chain. Making it work Putting 3D printing into play and reaping the benefits is a bit tricky, as, in most organisations, line operators are trained to manufacture products and to identify & report any line issues, the line engineers are trained to maximise line throughput, uptime and remedy any issues highlighted by the operators, and the procurement staff are trained on placing orders, managing suppliers & supply contracts. As such, for an organisation to bring spare-part manufacturing on-premise, would mean that these tasks (see above), that would normally be outsourced to a supplier, now needs to not only be performed internally, but also defined, scoped, managed and tracked internally. Furthermore, as these tasks aren?t currently part of any one's existing remit, nor are the skill-set needed to execute on any of these four 3D printing scenarios, let alone lead the digital transformation of an organisation?s spare-part supply chain, an organisation is left with a significant manpower constraint, a potential show-stopper. The Solution Organisations looking to successfully manage these scenarios and lead the digital transformation of their organisation?s spare parts supply chain, have two options open to them. The first being to expand the roles & responsibilities of existing resources to fractionally take on part of these activities, to which the nay-sayers would argue that this would undoubtedly distract them from the direct value creation they were hired for and be detrimental to the organisation. The second, and my recommendation, being to establish a dedicated team, populated though internal promotion or external on-boarding, with the specific mandate to oversee and execute all of the organisation?s 3D printing activities, to which the nay-sayers would argue that this would also require an organisation to on-board, train, develop and maintain not only new head-counts, but new types of head-counts with new type of management and performance metrics, etc. From a P&L standpoint, both cases introduce a new ?indirect value creating? cost centre to an organisation, which would either be made up of unitary head-counts or an equivalent fractional head-counts. Building the right team The ultimate objective of any organisation, looking to roll out a 3D printed spare-part strategy, is to establish a 3D printing centre of excellence to act as the capability custodians responsible for the development of 3D printing knowledge, application development and value creation, and establishing the decision criteria that will see part requests being delegating to procurement part that cannot be 3D printed or that do not meet the financial criteria for 3D printing. A 3D printing task-force, or the team overseeing this centre and mandated with these objectives, should be ideally composed of the following roles (with at least two or more individuals per site) Program management: to oversee the business aspects of individual 3D printing opportunities (parts) and to set and monitor objectives and success metrics. Design engineering: to understand specific 3D printing opportunity requirements (design, mechanical, environmental and functional) and to create, test and validate the parts and establish their respective quality standard. Printer operation: to manage the end-to-end 3D printing processes and to ensure produced parts meet the set quality standards. Technology liaison: to educate the workforce at large about the technology, materials and how it can be used to leveraged to solve daily production line challenges, and to work hand-in-hand with line workers, engineers and administrators to identify and qualify 3D printing opportunities on the production line (and the financial impact they may have). Rolling out on a global stage In 3D printing, like in any manufacturing endeavour, scale is key to profitability, as such for an organisation to truly benefit from a 3D printed spare part initiative it must roll out the technology and competencies far and wide in their organisation. Beyond simply catapulting printers in remote locations, the competencies need to be developed at each location and oversight needs to be structured to maximise adoption and business impact. This can be successfully achieved by starting from an organisation pilot facility, where new products are developed and new production line are created, tested and tweaked, from which the effort would expand to facilities manufacturing the same products in different locations, to those manufacturing similar products, and finally to facilities manufacturing different products, until 3D printing technology and 3D printed spare parts has fully transformed the organisation. And, for each new production line and facility, fewer and fewer new parts will need to be designed and tested, after a certain point, new production lines and facilities will be able to be on-boarded with a ready-made build-file database for all their spare part needs. In terms of manpower propagation, the technology liaison will be the most important player at every new site, there to scout, educate and evaluate the opportunity scope and scale in each new site. In a second phase, the printer operator (along with the first printer) would be next to be dispatched, with the objective of delivering the value (printing the parts) to the beneficiaries and to overcome 3D printing localisation issues (i.e. dealing with variations in environmental conditions); with engineering work to be performed remotely. Finally the project engineers and program managers would be deployed to develop the ?new part database?, to handle facility specific applications and to provide end-to-end oversight on larger & regional facilities. Does it all make financial sense? I like to refer to XKCD/1025 when choosing to invest time in anything, and 3D printing, designing spare parts and deploying a 3D printed spare part strategy is no different. No alt text provided for this image Each organisation will have a go-no-go threshold where the investment in manpower and capital equipment will be outweighed by the benefit 3D printing will bring to an organisation. The role of the first program manager, in the first facility, is to leverage all available resources at their disposal (on a shoe-string budget) to identify this threshold and to evaluate the potential of a 3D printing initiative to meet or exceed this threshold, and once the initiative has been rolled out, it will be to define the thresholds for individual opportunities (parts)? a topic for another article. The red card If an organisation is looking to adopt 3D printing, but is unable or unwilling to develop these expert resources, nor to equip them with adequate workstations and CAD packages, this organisation should step back and think again, seriously. Need help figuring out your manpower strategy? Feel free to reach out, I'd be more than happy to discuss the intricacies of your digital transformation initiatives and provide you with a new perspective, and perhaps even a solution. Stay Tuned for more! The following article will discuss the availability, need and requirements for a part database, also known as a virtual warehouse. Be sure to like and follow to ensure that you won't miss it! About The Kre8 Group The Kre8 Group is a global consultancy group, with offices and manpower in Canada, Hong-Kong, Singapore and Switzerland, focused entirely on facilitating sustainable 3D printing business strategies, technology adoption, application development and the business models, the production & operation workflows and processes that support it. </p>

<p> There are many business metrics that help leaders make the right decisions for their organisations, rules of thumb to drive every decision from the number of email accounts needed to the required square footage of the production floor to the number of custodial staff it will take to keep it all clean. Almost every aspect of a factory, and to some extent the organisation that drives or supports it, can be quantified by some manpower, capital equipment and raw material metric derived from the targeted production throughput and activities. Examples of this are the relationships between the number of CNC machines to the number of operators / programmers, the number of concurrent projects to the number of project managers, the number of production lines to the number of foremen and [ ?and ] the number of engineers to the number of CAD seats. But when it comes to 3D printing adoption, there is no such rules of thumb, there are no metrics that provide clear correlations between activities and a number of 3D printers needed to disrupt them, and even less on if these 3D printing capabilities should be internalised or outsourced, and what value they can create. The reason for this is that in most cases 3D printers aren?t direct substitutes for other manufacturing technologies, and aren?t designed to be dropped in to instantly create, unlock and enable value, they are part of a larger strategy that will see an organisation create, develop and deploy a 1-3-5 years manpower and technology development roadmap that will help them maintain market competitiveness and drive the long term commercial sustainability of their organisation. There are of course industry verticals where these 3D printing rules of thumb do exist, such is the case for dental, where the number of patients and the number of prescribed treatments easily translate to the number of stone models, trays, retainers, drill guides, etc, which can in turn be translated to a required printing capacity, material requirements and a realistic P&L. This article focuses on manufacturing organisations that are looking at 3D printing to revitalise their organisation and to gain the flexibility and resilience their need to thrive in a globalised economy. The 3D printing myth There is a common misconception across new adopters that 3D printed parts should be direct replacements to traditionally manufactured parts, equal in every way, down to the last design feature, property and behaviour. Unfortunately, that this is not the case. Yes, 3D printed parts are to some extent consistent in quality, and the technologies and their materials do provide consistency, predictability and reliability that can be expected of a 3D printed part, however they are not equal to their traditionally manufactured cousin. Fortunately manufacturing process homology is not, and should not be, the primary driver of 3D printer adoption. To win at 3D printing Winning 3D printing is not about making the same things in a different way, it?s about making new things in a new way, disrupting your status quo to create, unlock and enable value across your organisation, value that could not be created through traditional means of manufacturing or by relying on a supply chain, no matter how good it may be. 3D printing is not only the technology of choice for prototyping, short series (small lots) end-use part production and a fancy way of creating lighter and stronger parts for airplanes and F1 cars, 3D printing is a supporting technology that makes it possible for organisations to implement future-proofing strategies; enabling them to gain the manufacturing capability they need to: Shorten their product life-cycle and time to market; Take control of their supply chain (eliminate supplier dependencies); Maximise production uptime (or minimise downtime); Increase production throughput; Reducing manpower requirements; Improve production line ergonomics and employee satisfaction (better tools); Enable production line flexibility (to facilitate product changes for example), and most importantly Empower employees to become self reliant, enabling them to solve problems on their own without the involvement of procurement (aka. purchasing) and the delays and complexities they bring. In other words, creating, unlocking and enabling a myriad of value across any organisation. Where to start? There are unfortunately (or fortunately) a few thousand machines and material combinations an organisation can choose from and a near endless amount of settings and parameters that make these machines create anything from good parts to overcooked rice. Regardless of your objectives or targets, developing your organisation?s knowledge base and technological competency & know-how is key to ensure your organisation?s future resilience, competitiveness and sustainability. A great first step in this journey is to obtain engineering perspective on your activities to identify the key applications that your organisation can benefit from and that can be used to kickstart your 3D printing transformation: set adoption targets, outline an action plan to demonstrate feasibility and business impact, and quantify the total value created, unlocked or enabled at scale. ...and the time to start is now! Need help? If you?d like to talk or give your organisation the gentle push in the right direction, feel free to reach out, I?d be more than happy to meet and discuss. About The Kre8 Group The Kre8 Group is a global consultancy group, with offices and manpower in Canada, Hong-Kong, Singapore and Switzerland, focused entirely on facilitating sustainable 3D printing business strategies, technology adoption, application development and the business models, the production & operation workflows and processes that support it. </p>

<p> The unsustainability of 3D printing marketplaces The fundamentals of a marketplace is simple, a catalyst that facilitate transactions between suppliers and customers and earns a commission on transactions for their trouble; a tried and true business model in retail and services. In the 3D printing industry, 3D Hubs was the first to attempt to demonstrate the model, and since they started, in 2013, hundreds, if not thousands, of others have also followed. For the purpose of this analysis, let?s take the case of 3D Hubs as example, as it is the best in class and the defacto marketplace reference, they have an established track record and has a wealth of information in the public domain. Some 3D Hubs statistics Investment received: $4.5M in Sept 2014 and $7M in Aug. 2016 (source) Number of employees: 42 (source) Number of parts printed: 1 327 270 at the time of writing (source) Number of parts printed since the 25th of September 2017: 327 270 (source) Commission earned on sales: 12.5% (source) Average employee salary: ? 50K (source) So let?s crunch the numbers? Monthly burn rate Payroll A salary of ?50K a year equals roughly ?4,200 per month, if we imagine the five C-suites earns ?2,000 more and the five lowest paid employee ?1,000 less, the monthly payroll adds up to ?181,400. To which we add a 30% overhead to account for rental, insurance, furniture, electricity, computers, coffee, snacks, and everything else employees need around the office to perform their work, this becomes ?235,820 per month. Marketing The actual marketing expense is unknown, but lets work with a ?500 per day ad-spend (which is most likely below actual), this translates to an average of ?15,200 per month Software and services This is also an unknown, but for the sake of this exercise, let?s assume a ?10,000 per month, which is also most likely below actual. Travel, conferences and shows This is also an unknown, but let?s assume ?2,500 per person per instance, at three of such trips per month, this translates ?7,500 per month. Incidentals and the random things As there are always ad-hoc expenses, let?s assume a ?10,000 per month is spent in this manner. If we tally all these amounts, we obtain a monthly burn rate of roughly ?278,500, which gives them a 20 month lifeline on their last round of funding (ending in May 2018), at today's exchange rate. In perspective Considering that 3D Hubs earns on marketplace activities 12.5%, to break even on the monthly burn rate, they would need to generate ?2,228,000 in sales each month, or ?26,736,000 per year (roughly 40% of Materialise?s 2017 manufacturing revenue, source). Considering the 1,327,270 parts printed since 2013, of which 327,270 have been printed in the last 6 months (171 days since the 25th of September 2017, source), and placing an average ?10 price tag to each part (generous considering ?2 parts are very common), we can estimate that their revenue for the year ending in Q3 2018, things left unchanged, would be in the range of ?7M, or roughly 25% of their break even, which would extend their lifeline by 3 months (ending in August 2018). Is Marvin dead? As you may imagine the probability of breaking even under these conditions is very low. Justifiably so, 3D Hubs underwent a major pivot (read here), to focus near exclusively on commercial clients and foregoing with the marketplace business model to adopt a brokerage model, identical to that of MakeXYZ, where an attempt to fulfil orders through a closed network of suppliers is first presented to the client before opening up the marketplace through a link. How will this affect business? It is too soon to tell, however implementing a brokerage model could see them increase their sales commission to as much as 40% (akin to other platforms delegating their productions to a third party) effectively tripling their earnings on every transaction. This, combined with a near complete clientele changeover, who might bring in significantly higher value orders, 3D Hubs could soon be breaking even, and with a bit of luck that day may perhaps be as early as mid-2019... which is pretty good considering. As for the faith of Marvin, he seems alive and well (even though he's a grumpy looking fellow) Lesson to be learned? If you are so inclined to start your own marketplace, don?t, become a service broker instead. </p>

<p>3D Printing and Industry 4.0 Over the course of the last few years, there has been a lot of talk about the future of 3D printing, the future of manufacturing and industry 4.0, which is essentially an intersection between data-sciences, IoT and manufacturing (which includes 3D printing, robotics and all other manufacturing technologies and processes). Across all this talk, there is a pervasive, genuine desire, a universal goal sort of speak, that is to shorten the supply chains, minimise waste, reduce manpower and to bring better, more appealing products to consumers worldwide the most efficient way possible. True enough, 3D printing is certainly a technology that is earmarked to deliver on these promises. Unfortunately, the dream of owning a machine that could manufacture everything and make you completely independent from the outside world, is still a dream. And, in all honesty, I doubt we?ll ever live in a world where we?ll 3D print single-use plastic cutlery for our backyard BBQs let alone 3D print an antifreeze reservoir for our cars (and install our ourselves), even though both are made of plastic and could technically be 3D printed. So let?s talk plastics In the world of plastics, traditional manufacturing is king, especially when it comes to producing large quantities of parts at the lowest possible cost. Just think of the endless supply of injection moulded plastic forks & spoons, the billions of blow moulded bottles, the infinitely available extruded plastic bags, or the iconic thermoformed plastic cups. Plastic is unavoidable, it?s a commodity, it drives our economy, it makes or contain all the products we use, it is a symbol of progress, it fills our stores, our pantries, our homes and also our oceans? heck we love plastics so much we even eat it (chewing gum). So where does 3D printing fits in? 3D printing won't solve all our problems, it will most likely never make a sizable impact on what?s mentioned above, but it might well deliver a huge impact on higher-value product life-cycles and get us closer to our universal goal of shortening supply chains, minimising waste and bringing better products to consumers. A concrete example of a strong value proposition is 3D printed spare-parts, which would not only postpone obsolescence, extend product usability and increase owner satisfaction, but also effectively minimise transport, warehousing and waste along the way. 3D printed spares? A difficult reality When it comes to manufacturing, a common scenario for an engineer is to design and simulate in silico the prototype design using the intended production polymers (say PBT), prototype using whatever is convenient (say PLA, ABS or some nondescript resin) and test it using adjusted for prototype production test metrics. Through which, and by near divine intervention, the design gets validated, pushed to production only to be redesigned for manufacturing by another engineer, sent to tooling where yet another engineer will introduce a few changes before prototype tools are cut, then to QA, then adding a few more changes, before production tools can be cut and production starts. A few years later, when the part is no longer in production, when the moulds are retired, stocks are depleted and the products need to be serviced, a new tool is cut by a different supplier, using possibly a different part version, and shot in which ever polymer is most convenient and cost effective to meet the long tail production targets. Then comes the supplier provided parts and subassemblies of unknown origin, design or serviceability, which are tested and validated commodity parts and subassemblies, dragged and dropped in a design to accelerate time to market, reduce the BOM cost and simplify the supply chain and manufacturing footprint of a product. Making sense of it all and creating value throughout this process is what needs to be done, and it starts by unifying design across all stages, from ideation to long tail spares. Future-proofing When we?re thinking about legacy products (essentially everything that has been manufactured to date), finding 3D printing opportunities consist mostly of drilling down a manufacturer?s part database to identify 3D printable parts (directly or through redesign), then liaising with their purchasing and supply chain departments to understand each parts business case before an OEM can consider 3D printing it, in reality this is a near insurmountable task that many startups are currently tackling. However when we look into a 3D printed future, we can imagine a future where parts can be equally traditionally manufactured and 3D printed with the same level of consistency and quality. A future that effectively enables manufacturers to switch between the any manufacturing technology at will and in accordance to the specific market needs and supporting business cases. In practical terms, to achieve this 3D printed future, and ultimately enable Industry 4.0, designers and engineers must formulate new design rules that go beyond beyond their intended manufacturing technology and integrate, or intersect them, with the design rules for other technologies (such as 3D printing) that may create value in their value chain, and for which they may wish to have the option to produce production parts with, now or in the future. This intersecting design rule set, can be illustrated as such, where on one side there are the design rules and design freedoms of 3D printing, which are then limited by the design rules of the manufacturing technology that will be used to produce the bulk of the parts. Adopting these intersecting design rules will not only ensure that a parts can be 3D printed as eventual spares with reliability and confidence, but also 3D printed as production grade prototypes, functional prototypes and pre-production short series, thus making it possible to unify all stages of design, production and servicing under a single design. Taking it a step further To further create value out of this unification, identifying and qualifying the external variables that may positively or negatively impact manufacturing, and eliminate, or mitigate, them before they can manifest an impact is key to future-proofing. These variables can be either intrinsic to a process, such as mould wear caused by abrasive materials, or introduced to a process by humans, through substitutions and lack of general rigour. In practical terms, variable elimination, or mitigation, consists primarily in addressing variables found in the three central pillars of manufacturing: materials, technologies and data, and addressing them by unifying them across the entire chain of events. Unifying the materials Unifying materials consists of using the same materials across all stages of design and production, in other words bringing production materials to prototyping technologies, using for example Ensinger Delrin 150 filaments to prototype a part that will eventually be injection moulded with Delrin 150. Unifying the technologies Unifying technologies consists of using the same machines across all stages of design and production, in other words using the same 3D printers (make, model and build parameters) to produce prototypes, functional prototypes, pre-production short series and spare parts, and if possible the actual production parts. Unifying the data Unifying data consists of maintaining a part database, a digital twin of sorts, on which all changes and adjustments are recorded no matter where they are made, making it possible for all involved, at all stages, to use the same design. By unifying these three pillars, variations caused by the differences in materials, technology and design and the behavioural assumption made from one to another can be eliminated. Effectively empowering people to make the right decisions, simplifying design and accelerating refactoring, ultimately delivering a better product at lower cost. Enabling Industry 4.0 Through unification of design rules, materials, technologies and data the benefits of Industry 4.0 become apparent and within reach of any OEM, where by sales & market demand would dictate production volumes and drive part movements across the supply & distribution chains, to have quality and failure data drive design and tooling refurbishment & retirement, to have true part behavior predictability from ideation to after-sales service, and to support design refactoring with actual production & market data. This level of clarity can be achieved by implementing data acquisition and sharing platforms that will capture and qualify failures & needs, and communicate the synthesised information to those who can act on them. Effectively allowing an OEM to implement changes at one end and have them immediately understood and reflected everywhere else within minutes. I hoped you enjoyed this article, do reach out if you would like to discuss further. I'm always (t)here. </p>

<p>Fun facts about Singapore, in 2015-2016, 94 % of Singapore's residents lived in high rise domiciles: 80.1 % in public housing (HDB) and 13.9 % in private housing such as condos and apartments, and home ownership was 90.8 % nationwide. Each of the estates that make up the singaporean landscape are equipped with a health, fitness & exercise area, a gym whether it indoors or outdoors as shown below. In my case, our 280 unit estate has both an outdoor aerobics area and a classroom sized indoor gym equipped with the run of the mill exercise equipment: free-weights, medicine bags and an assortment of rapidly aging machines, such as thread-mills, stationary bicycles, elliptical trainer and stair-masters. The key operative word here is aging, averaging around 10-12 years of consistent use and abuse. Last week it came to my attention that one of these machines, the elliptical trainer to be precise, had a broken foot rest (the thing that holds your foot in place) and became consequently unusable, as your foot tended to just slide off the paddle as you moved. To remedy the situation, the condo's management team has been searching far and wide for a spare, for months now, without any luck. The only option left, and currently under debate by the owners association, was to replace the entire machine at a cost of $10,000 - $15,000. Granted that on a 10 years amortisation period it came down to $4 a day, which is completely reasonable, but still appeared to be absolutely teeth grinding outrageous considering that only the foot rest was broken, a part which would at the very most cost $150 to replace (if it had been available). So I took it upon myself to design and 3D print a replacement part, which took: 10 minutes to tear-down, measure and figure out how to fasten the new spare in place, 30 minutes of CAD and a total of 4 hours of 3D printing and 600g of filament for two 2 design iterations, If we discount my time, anti-slip tape, nuts & bolts and ignore all other project ancillaries, this spare costs $46.50, or $6.50 in printing time (if we amortise a $3,500 Ultimaker 3 based on 60 hours of usage a month over 3 years) and $ 40 in filament ($50 for 750g of Ultimaker ABS on discount). A $46.50 3d printed part saved our estate a $10,000 - $15,000 expense. If we factor in manpower (at a rate of $175 / hour) and add a nominal $3 for the anti-slip tape, nuts & bolts, it still only adds up to $154.50, which is still very reasonable. 3D printing...and all is right in the world again Extrapolating Considering that these machines are rather robust and have a 10-15 year life-span, the problem faced-and-solved here is most likely highly prevalent and 3D printing could create immense value to homeowners nation-wide. Considering there are more than 400 private estates, where say 25% of them are at least more than 10 years of age and have at least one of theses machines that suffered from a broken plastic part (that could effectively be 3D printed), we're looking at a total addressable market of $ 1,000,000 to $1,500,000 in fitness equipment, which could be saved by less than $5,000 in 3D printed parts. Gives you something to think about. I hoped you enjoyed, do reach out if you would like to learn more. I'm always (t)here. </p>

<p>The importance of costing The ability to accurately and reliably cost parts is fundamental to any business, both for establishing the running costs of a given technology as well as accurately pricing the parts to ensure profitable commercial exercises. The business of costing Fabnami has been in the business of costing parts since 2013, consistently processing more than 250 000 STLs each month and facilitating millions in revenue for service bureaus worldwide. The Fabnami costing engine is built on a series of custom costing models specific to unique machine, material and print settings combinations, such as: PA 2200 on a EOS Formiga P110 set to 100?m layers or ULTEM 1010 on a Fortus 450mc using a T14 Tip set to 254?m layers and sparse support, etc. Over the course of the last few month we have seen a noticeable increase in HP Multi Jet Fusion printers going online through Fabnami, and an equally noticeable increase in the revenue they generate for their service bureaus. (Which is no surprise...) To support this growth, Fabnami has introduced a series of costing models for the different HP Multi Jet Fusion printer versions (3200, 4200 & 4210) and the print settings they offer (fast & balanced). Introducing the Fabnami HP Multi Jet Fusion Costing Tool To the benefit of the additive manufacturing community, Fabnami has made its HP Multi Jet Fusion Costing Tool freely available (for a limited time). Using the tool, users are able to input costing parameters that best represents their business and instantly compute the cost of any given part according to our two costing models. You can try our HP Multi Jet Fusion Costing Tool for yourself here. Parameter Input Form Through the parameter input form, users can either select preset reference parameters or input their own. Costing Summary Cost is computed according to two methods, the first taking into consideration the part and its box volume, the second using the part and its offset volume (opportunity volume). It is to note that the time component computed by the Fabnami engine should be interpreted as effective time, or the pro-rated machine time needed to print the part in the context of a full build volume of the same height. Effective time is also an important estimator as it is immune to part orientation, where the effective print time of a part in any of its six orientations is the same. You can also read more about offset volume and part nesting in this article: Nesting detection for advanced SLS pricing. Give it a try ! Click here to test the HP Multi Jet Fusion Costing Tool for yourself. Derived costing parameters The costing parameters pre-set in the HP Multi Jet Fusion Costing Tool have been derived from indicative information available online, to make this tool impactful in your organisation, these parameters need to be tweaked to values derived from your printer specific settings and supplier prices. Machine Amortisation Hourly amortisation has been estimated exclusively on advertised machine price (such as on computerworld.com), it excludes other costs such as floor space, HVAC, maintenance, warranty & spares and other ancillary machines, devices and tools (such as the HP Processing Station). Consumables Costs The bulk price of consumables, and the corresponding unit pricing, are based on prices listed on itprices.com, which may differ from the official HP price-list, and your negotiated prices. Detailing & Fusion Agent Usage The values stated below are as provided by HP technical documentation (directly available here), actual agent usage, included any wastage & vestige, can be derived from your build logs. ttps://app.fabnami.net/hp/demo.html Build Speed The values stated below are as provided by HP technical documentation (directly available here), actual agent usage, included any wastage & vestige, can be derived from your build logs. Want to learn more ? You can try our HP Multi Jet Fusion Costing Tool for yourself here, and if you are interested in learning more about costing parts for the HP Multi Jet Fusion 3D printer, or for other printers you may have, sales & production automation or about any other 3D printing topic, please feel free to contact us : [email protected] </p>

<p>3D Printed Eyewear, not ready for prime-time :( Those who know me, know that I have an idea a minute and a huge appetite for half-baked ideas, the burned frozen fish stick kind of idea. For the last few years I?ve been operating under an open door innovation policy, where every idea deserves my attention, decent ideas deserves a pitch-deck, a business plan and a week of my time, and good ideas get a few months and a few coins to get them off the ground. My innovation and portfolio development process is, to be honest, a bit puzzling for some and dizzying for others? but seems to work for me as it syncs up with my thought process and satisfies my desire to get my hands dirty. One of these ideas, which for the last 5 or 6 years has been one of my favorite pet project on my roster, was to develop dyes, pigments and other functional & value-adding coatings to post-process SLS 3D printed plastic parts and make them as consumer ready as a 3D printed part can be. On a side note, we?ve also been developing membranes and coagulation & flocculation agents to filter out dyes, pigments and other additives from unpolymerised SLA resin to make it possible to change the colour and polymerised mechanical properties of resins, vats at a time, without having to maintain a vat for each type of resin needed. But let?s keep this topic for another article? Now, back to dyes. To put things in context, a few grams of dye powder is enough to make a bathtub full of dying solution and also enough colour the same amount of parts? so you can imagine a service bureau with a kilo of each colour has enough dye to colour parts for years and years. So even though we?ve developed a global client base, repeat business is kind of an issue. So like any other business, we started thinking about how to drive consumption, searching for applications, products, businesses that could use our dyes in larger quantities. This has been going on for more than a year now, yes, and without much breakthrough on the matter, this until two months ago. Two months ago I get a call from an entrepreneur aspiring to bring 3D printed eyewear to the masses and looking to grow his network across Asia. As he was talking, the dots started connecting in my head, the lights started turning on, and soon it felt like Deepavali. So the pitch became simple 3D printed eyewear Singapore first mass-customised consumer product, creating a new consumer product category and paving the way for others companies to follow suit and bring their own innovation to market. Effectively formalising Singapore?s 3D printing footprint and demonstrating the commercial viability of end-to-end production of customised consumer goods, and selling our dyes in the process, a lot of it. Like any Singaporean entrepreneur we picked up the phone and called NAMIC who supports 3D printing ideas with up to S$ 250K (? 156K) in grants, then to Spring Singapore which supports the growth of local SMEs with up to in S$ 2M (? 1.25M) in grants, and finally made a call to the EDB which supports the growth of large companies and MNC operating in key industries with no limits on financial support. The conversation were all very positive, each one of them had been looking on ways to close the additive manufacturing loop, develop national post-processing capabilities to create a fully vertically integrated 3D printing value chain for local production of made to order custom & unique products to Singaporean and regional consumers? and we had that missing ingredient, dyes. And it all made sense, being that Singapore is one of the world?s largest luxury market, it has the world?s highest density of millionaires (15.5%, Bloomberg 2009) and its citizens have the third highest GDP per capita (US$56,700, Forbes 2017)? so across the 2.25M myopics, who consume 1M frames a year, we?re certainly able to find 5000 to buy 3D printed eyewear and prove my point. Right? On top of that, I discovered that Singaporean opticians have on average a catalog of 1500 SKUs and 5000 frames in stock at any given time and that all of them were looking for ways to reduce this stock to reduce their sunk costs and provide them a bit of liquidity, something 3D printing has been striving to solve for, like, ever. So it?s all good so far, the government?s on board, the market is there, opticians have a problem that 3D printed eyewear can solve? definitely enough for a pitch deck, a few weeks of my time and the cost of producing samples. Boom. A month later, half dozen pitches under the belt, the project is dead. So what happened? Why did the project fall flat and why 3D printed eyewear isn?t ready for prime-time? I?m sure there are many more reason, but here are 4 that came up during our market outreach. SLS Nylon is just too flexible Eyewear needs to be rigid to ensure that the location of the lenses remains constant over the eye, this is especially true for progressive bifocal lenses where the Sphere (SPH) and Additional Magnification (ADD) varies across the vertical axis to concurrently accommodate both presbicia and myopia (in older people) as well as toric lenses, to correct astigmatism, where the optical power and focal length varies as the lenses Axis rotates around its center. In the current state of the 3D Printing industry, Nylon Sintering, whether it be SLS, MJF, SHS or other, is the closest technology the industry has to mass produce products. Unfortunately the resulting parts, although durable, are extremely flexible compared to traditional eyewear materials such as polycarbonate and acetate (or titanium in the case of metal frames). As such, as the sintered frame flexes, the relative location of the lenses to the eyes will move, in turn dynamically changing their perceived optics. Consequently, this lens movement throughout the day will make the wearer dizzy and potentially delivering a powerful headache (the kind you get with new glasses). Test it for yourself, simply tilt your glasses forwards and see the effect of the change, now imagine this happening all day long. To illustrate SLS Nylon 12 flexibility, gentle forces, similar to normal wear conditions, have been applied to a frame with living hinges to demonstrate flex (left) as well as one with mechanical hinges to demonstrate torsion (right). 3D printed eyewear have the wrong market fit (Quality & Price) 3D printing is expensive compared to traditional mass market manufacturing, the cutting edge 3D printed frames frames still cost S$ 80 (? 50) to print and finish, and by the time it reaches the optician it becomes roughly S$ 125 (? 78). In comparison, the quality of the 3D printed frame have the perceived value equal to that of the S$ 2?3 sunglasses you buy at the petrol kiosk, this according to leading opticians and optical distributors in Singapore. This said, the promise 3D printing brings is size and fit customisation: unique frames for unique faces, however current frame manufacturer already offer a wide enough variety to satisfy the needs of 80% of the population (as well as addressing the Asian fit issues) which is unfortunately insufficient to account for the price disparity. Everyone in the eyewear industry knows that clients want a lot of variety in colour, pattern, texture and feel, unfortunately 3D printed frames are at best monochromatic: single colour, single finish, single texture, also not enough to excite the client or to justify the price disparity. In context, Owndays outlets (Japanese eyewear super-chain) hold a selection of 2000?3000 frame SKUs which come in a myriad for colourful options, materials, textures and finishes with a perceived value far beyond those of 3D printed frames. As for costs, their glasses average a total retail price of S$ 150 (? 94) including lenses, where their material cost average around S$ 30 (? 18.75), of which S$ 10 (? 6.25) is for the frame. 3D printed eyewear have the wrong market fit (Lead-time) In today?s market, mass market optician shops like Owndays are able to deliver eyewear within the same day, if not within an hour. If you?re like me and you have and have ?ooohh, we?re going to have to special order your lenses? vision, lead-time is then extended to overnight or at worst two days. And even in the super fancy understaffed optical shops that feature S$ 1200+ (? 750+) Dita frames in their bargain bins still are able to deliver glasses within a 2 to 3 day window. In the current state of 3D printing, the shortest realistic lead-time for printing and finishing a frame, this if the entire supply chain is localised, would be 1 week at best. However, as part finishing facilities aren?t readily available in every city, the production lead-time of 3D printed eyewear is effectively 3?4 weeks, which is far beyond mass-market and far too long of a wait time to make it an exciting value proposition to clients. 3D printed eyewear have no brand value Brand value is a bit hard to understand for eyewear as often only the wearer knows it, as opposed to products like clothing, shoes, handbags or bicycles for which their brands shine like a bat-signal to all who passes. Regardless of the actual quality of the product, the brand communicates perceived value to the consumer, reassures them that the product is of a certain quality and that no matter what happens the brand will be there to protect them, like a wooly blanket. Just think of drugs, a doctor says to a patient: ?Your feelings of depression are temporary, I?ll give you a prescription for some Fluoxetine, and you?ll be right as rain in no time?, patient replies: ?Could you give me Prozac instead??. Even though Prozac is Fluoxetine, the value the brand provides to the patient is the assurance of potency or effect, even if it is artificial. One of the core opportunities 3D printing unlocks is the ability to produce small batches of anything at relatively low costs. One could leverage this to establish a new private label of built-to-order or built-to-stock over the counter sunglasses or clear vision fashion eyewear, overcoming the challenges caused by frame flexibility by not having prescription while delivering the benefits of 3D printed eyewear. Not a bad idea right? Now imagine these private label frames proudly hanging next to Ray-Ban Aviators, the titan of the fashion eyewear industry, glossy and iconic with a brand that commands status to all who see it, and at a price of S$150 (? 94) just slightly higher than the cost of the 3D printed private label ones. It?ll be a hard sell. OK, so what about partnering with a brand, say Staccato or Desigual, who have strong brand equity, a healthy client base in the same target demographic and no eyewear in their product catalogue. That could work? Or what about a local label like Ong Shunmugam or Depression? Surely having direct access to local designers could prove to be successful at establishing a partnership and a product line. True, so we did out-reach, we called a few companies and a few designers, but without any luck. We discovered that larger companies seek above all large profit margins, which, with the size of their distribution and retail real-estate have the ability to reach out directly to eyewear leaders such as Luxotica, to create custom collections that will both best represent their brands and deliver handsome profit margins they desire. While talking directly to designers, we discovered that their focus is regardless of price or margin, and that it?s all about the ability to deliver on the design and vision that they are striving to achieve, which require materials, textures, finishes that go far beyond the current capabilities of 3D printing, or even hybrid manufacturing (3D printing with a mix of off the shelf parts or traditionally manufactured parts). So Is it really all doom and gloom for the 3D printed eyewear industry? Happily it?s not! We have identified three opportunities that could be captured by 3D printing. 1. Opticians do have inventory problems An optician shop might have 1000?1500 SKUs in their inventory, multiple copies of each totalling a few thousands units in stock, this to accommodate the whims and desires of their clients, however this huge inventory represent a huge sunk cost in operating an optician shop, one that many would like to get rid of. Especially considering that frames can remain on the shelves for years before they are sold of garbaged at a loss. There is a huge push on all sides to reduce the number of SKUs and the size of in boutique inventory, 3D printing is definitely on everyone?s radar and everyone is waiting for 3D printing to deliver. 2. Super high-end eyewear When retailing a S$ 125 (? 78) 3D printed frame, the price becomes S$ 275 (? 170) and perhaps S$ 350 (? 218) with lenses, which makes 3D printed eyewear not cheap enough to compete at the sub S$ 200 (? 125) low end, and not premium enough to compete with the S$ 500 (? 315) mid-range. However a niche opportunity for 3D printed eyewear that we did uncover is in the super high-end eyewear segment, the S$ 1500+ (? 936+) frames. In this segment the bespoke craftsmanship, refined design elements backed by an artisanal story, is enough to command a price. Minutely post-processed 3D printed parts, polymer and metal, could complement other traditionally crafted parts to create complex, bespoke and sought after designs. This unique value proposition would go head to head with brands such as Mykita, Matsuda or Lindberg, which already command the status symbol of extreme luxury. Adding the customisation of form and fit, that 3D printing provides, to similar design elements, textures and finishes to these brands could deliver a significant added value and be transformative in this niche segment. This said, this market is not very large, but it?s there and getting bigger. 3. Semi-disposable, re-printable children eyewear Everybody knows: children break things, lose things and inexplicably stop liking things, often in a matter of seconds. From the opticians? point of view, children?s faces are really, really, hard to fit with glasses. And it?s for these reasons that this eyewear segment is by far the easiest to capture, decentralise and democratise through 3D printing, even low cost 3D printing. In this segment, designs could be built around a selection of fixed lens shapes, that parents and children could design around, print and reprint: Thing-O-Matic style. Using no more than basic household devices like a camera and a ruler, parents could measure their children?s pupillary distance, width of the bridge and the lengths of the temple (the arms that connects to the ears), type them in a wizard and let the kids design away, printing and reprinting as they want. The price point to meet in this segment is S$ 80 (? 50) frame and lenses, and provided the child?s eyesight doesn?t change, that S$ 80 could perhaps last them midway in elementary school before newer larger lenses would be required, similar to the Stokkecrib and Infento bicycles. If you?d like to talk more about these points, or would like to pitch an idea, feel free to message me (you can find me on Linkedin), i?m always (t)here. </p>

<p>Since 2015, a considerable amount of my teams time has been dedicated to understanding the 3D printing industry, performing in-depth analyses to understand the intricacies that drives business in more than 1200 industrial service bureaus (who own at least one printer with a value greater than US$150K) in 352 cities across 32 countries. The insights uncovered by this endeavour has created great value to us and our clients, but most importantly, it helped us uncover a resounding reality that for the majority of service bureaus business is tough and getting tougher by the day. Digging deeper in the matter, we uncovered that many service bureaus place the burden of profitability on their ability to fill their capacity, and their inability to do so is only amplified by the ever increasing capacity being made available in the service bureau market, which in the case of many is only to be left idling or switch off altogether. As is often the case, service bureaus have resorted to increasing their prices to maintain a commercially viable operation. Which from the client's perspective however, high 3D printing service prices favours machine adoption, further hindering the service bureau's ability to fill their capacity, stagnating the service bureau economy and making it increasingly difficult for service bureau to thrive. Getting the price right, unlocking the industry Two weeks ago, we set out on an experiment to demonstrate commercial viability of a subscription based 3D printing service bureau (you can read more about it here). One of the hypothesis we set forth in this experiment was that the role of pricing is key to the reinvigoration of the industry. Our premise is that by establishing a fair and predictable pricing structure, clients would increase their use of the technology and in turn growth. Pricing it right We cannot pretend that price alone is sufficient to win business, however, price is a certainly sufficient motivator to gain favour and secure sustained short-series and production business, specifically when it comes to delaying printer acquisition. The key to effective pricing is understanding both printing costs, their associated operational overheads, and setting realistic earning expectations above a targeted production throughput; essentially pricing for the business you want to get, instead of pricing for the business you are getting. Human cost centers aside, establishing the cost of a print surrounds placing value to the material, equipment amortisation and lost-opportunity. Without going into exhaustive details, we?ll briefly explore powder based (SLS, MJP, DOP, CJP, SHS, etc) and resin based (SLA, DLP, CLIP. etc) costings. Powder based systems Powder based systems, non-metal, are the easiest to cost as they require no support structures during the print process. The costing components are as follows: Material: a direct function of the part's offset volume - and when additives are used they are a direct function of the part's volume and the (box volume - build volume) in the case of MJP's detailing agent. Amortisation: a fraction of the total build time, at targeted capacity, equal to the given part's offset-volume over the targeted capacity volume, and Lost-opportunity: a function of the un-occupied space trapped by the parts geometry, crevices and enclosed voids, normally assessed by nesting detection. Resin based systems Resin based systems are a bit trickier to cost on account of the bounded support structures and the part's A/B surfaces. The key revolves around the ability to orient the part in the direction that minimises the average contiguous surface area of each build layer and prioritise support placement on the B surface. This orientation achieved, the costing components are as follows: Material: a direct function of the part's volume and shadow volume (support structures), Amortisation: a direct function of the part's height, in the optimal orientation, multiplied by the average layer (scanning and re-coating) time, and Lost-opportunity: a function of the sum of a part's contiguous surface area of each of its build layer over the sum of maximum contiguous surface area for the given printer, pro-rated for the occupied XY area over the printer's build area. Mitigating the risks As pricing consists of managing averages, and pricing in accordance to the risks of being under-average, as such pricing will aim to attain targeted margins averaging transactions over a given exercise period: week, month, quarter, year. Risk mitigation can be achieved through capacity retailing, where instead of selling services by-the-part and managing the inefficiencies between any two parts, directly selling capacity in a printer; in turn transferring this risk to the client in exchange for the incentive of print-as-much-as-fits formulas, as per how we aim to demonstrate with 3DPrintSG's subscription model. Need help with pricing? We've built Fabnami, a complete e-commerce and ERP solution for 3D printing service bureaus, to specifically address these difficulties, contact us to learn more [email protected]</p>

<p>3D Printing: Opportunity in Hesitation Since the beginning of its time, the 3D printing industry and access to its technologies has been split in two camps: service bureaus and printer ownership. Where both camps have been striving to grow into each other?s space: OEMs bringing increasingly cost effective printers to the market to prompt early adoption and service bureaus becoming increasingly cost effective to delay adoption. Having spent most of my career building service bureaus and service bureau technologies, I?ve come to appreciate the market reality that service bureaus will never outperform machine ownership in production environments and vice-versa in prototyping. Formulating this thesis in terms of product quantity vs effectiveness, we can illustrate the situation as follows: The Hesitation I?ve also come to realise that there will be a time when every client considers acquiring their own machines and internalise production to reduce their 3D printing service bureau expenditure. During this period, the client?s hesitation can swing either way, stick with services a bit longer or buy their own machines. The Opportunity This period of client hesitation, the battlefield where service bureaus and OEMs go head to head, provides a unique opportunity to service bureaus to not only grow their revenues but also initiate sustainable business models that will provide them forecastable revenues, a luxury many service bureaus do not have. Capturing these opportunities can be done in many ways, including pre-paid services and joint ventures, however the most sustainable and revenue generating business model are subscriptions based, where for a fixed price a predefined quantity of services are offered. Combining subscription based services with the traditional art-to-part business, allows service bureaus to not only retain clients for a longer period of time and deliver a stronger value proposition but also enable them to stem early adoption. Art-to-Part The traditional 3D printing service bureau offering to clients with varied needs with regards to material choice and production quantity. The art-to-part business model excels in its ability to provide easy, accessible and cost effective access to a wealth of materials on an as needed basis. Off Premise Subscriptions An adapted and tailored solution for clients with consistent 3D printing needs but with varied material requirements. Off premise subscription business models excel in providing an all-you-can-print access to the wealth of materials for a fixed price On Premise Subscriptions Ideal for clients with consistent 3D printing needs across a specific material spectrum. On premise subscription business models are able to deliver the convenience of 3D printer ownership under a flexible service cost structure eliminating the risk associated to the capital expenditure of ownership. Proof is in the Pudding To demonstrate commercial viability of subscription business models, The Kre8 Group, Asia?s leading 3D Printing management consultancy firm, builder of over a dozen 3D printing factories & service bureaus and automator of 150 more, has launched a subscription only 3D printing service bureau: 3D Printing Singapore aimed at providing a wide range of FDM thermoplastics printed and delivered as fast as overnight, and same day when permitting. A Model For Global Expansion As early as Q1 2018, based on demand and success, our objective will be to establish a global franchise network able of delivering a globally local 3D printing service able of consistent, repeatable and reproducible quality to handle everything from prototyping to production. Join in! Based in Singapore? Sign up today with plans as low as S$ 58.88 per month. Not in Singapore? You can register your interest here to become both a franchisee and as a subscriber.</p>

<p>For service bureaus to reinforce their client mandates, maximise their value proposition and maintain their competitive edge over larger players, they must adapt and adopt business and operations models that : Simplifies and streamlines sales acquisition, client communications and operations; Diversifies sales formats and sources (how business is acquired and where it come from), and Creates and derives value from local, and global, 3D printing value networks composed of partners, suppliers and competitors. The remainder of this article will focus on exploring these three points in greater detail. Simplify and streamline sales acquisition, client communications and operations As much as 3D printing has proven itself to be an unmanned manufacturing technology, the business processes around it, and driving it, aren?t. The inefficiencies surrounding 3D printing are so great as to make the best of business models in the most fertile market fail. To help service bureaus understand the cost associated to each business opportunity, lets imagine it takes the average account manager (paid ? 25 / h with 30% overhead) 22 mins to prepare a quotation (including all client communications) and an additional 3 minutes for his, or her, supervisor (paid ? 35 / h with 30% overhead) to approve the quote before it is sent. In this scenario, each quote issued cost the service bureau ? 14.19, if we factor the conversion rate of this sales channel, say 55%, the effective cost of a single won opportunity would be ? 25.80. Which mean that there needs to be at least ? 25.80 of margins over the cost of production before profit can be perceived, this not counting other costs such as marketing and business development which will also affect profit margins. We?ve made a tool, available here, to enable you to compute the cost of each business opportunity in your service bureau or organisation. Automation can play a key role in helping service bureaus gain control of their operational costs, namely automation can be leveraged to rank and route opportunities, automate quotations & order intake, automatically outsource services, production or post-processing when needed and provide first line of customer support. Operationally speaking, this lean transformation of a service bureau could take on the following shape: Achieving this state, and maximising the impact of automation on a service bureau bottom line can be made through strategic integration of enterprise solutions such as Fabnami. Diversify sales formats and sources For any commercial entity, acquiring business is the foundation on which everything else is built, for without sales there would be no need for the machinery to produce, nor the manpower to operate them. Sales in 3D printing service bureaus are no different, and usually revolve around three key business development activities Driving online traffic and converting site visits to RFQs; Inside / outside sales to secure either RFQs or service level agreements, and Specialty projects for which 3D printing is a key role in. The work product of these activities are what I call managed sales channels, or business acquisition channels for which active and ongoing business development efforts are required to maintain and secure each new sales opportunities stemming from them, otherwise known as direct selling. In this evolving market, opportunities being increasingly scarce and competition being increasingly fierce, hence the need to intensify focus on business acquisition is becoming apparent. This said, with each new sales channel stemming from these traditional threes, ongoing customer management and business development efforts will be required, in turn limiting the ability to scale beyond what a service bureau?s account managers are able to handle... at best linear growth, in reality or sub-linear growth. To achieve super-linear growth, the work product of business development activities must result in unmanaged sales channels, or business acquisition channels in which active and ongoing business development efforts are not performed to secure new sales opportunities, but to maintain the health of the channel, thus decoupling sales from the sales effort. This second sales strategy is called channel selling, and consists primarily of leveraging a network of resellers, partners and agents to grow a client base and generate sales on your behalf. The benefits of adopting a channel sales strategy, as opposed to a direct sales approach, are immense and provides the root organisation the abilities and flexibility to enter new markets & verticals without first developing an extensive market understanding, vertical credibility or establishing a client network to adopt an advisory role to sales execution, while focussing direct sales efforts on bigger accounts with higher conversion rates to focus on value proposition, process & production optimisation and quality improvement Organisationally speaking, a service bureau leveraging both managed and unmanaged sales channels, could take on the following shape: Establishing unmanaged sales channels can be done in many ways, such as: Providing an API level access to your service bureau to web entrepreneurs enabling them to establish drop shipping workflows to fulfill orders they secure from their client base; Becoming part of Shapeways, i.Materialise, Fictiv, Rapid Form?s (and others) approved supplier list; Joining 3D Hubs for unmanaged RFQ acquisition, or Qualifying for 3D Hubs?s direct manufacturing supply chain programs: drop ship order fulfilment opportunities, such as FairPhone accessory production, or material & technology sample production programs. About FairPhone Instead of mass producing cases and accessories and shipping them to destinations around the world, FairPhone has been digitally distributing their accessories through a distributed production network: 3D Hubs. This production model enabled them to eliminate risk and long lead times associated with upfront investments in machinery, as well as the need for stock and wasted zero resources from overproduction. Since the initiative has started in July 2014, more than 20 000 accessories have been locally 3D printed, learn more here. Create and derive value from local, and global, 3D printing value networks composed of partners, suppliers and competitors The key operand of this strategy is co-ompetition, or creating synergies across competing entities to create and derive value that is greater than the sum of their individually created value ?if they were to operate individually as true-competitors. A successful implementation of this strategy is agricultural cooperatives, where each participant focus on creating value in a specific portion of the value chain, while being able to benefit from the value created along the entire value chain to drive and grow their business. In the world of 3D printing services, co-ompetition happens when service bureaus of a network become both supplier and client to one-another, collectively leveraging their knowledge, know-how and production infrastructures to jointly address the needs of their markets and the opportunities they bring, as illustrated below. Practically speaking, this synergy could be established along lines of: Technology, where a service bureau?s focus is on becoming a center of excellence for a given technology Services, where a service bureau develops and masters specific added value services, such as design, design for AM, topology optimisation, assembly consolidation and the likes Post-processing, where a service bureau becomes the exclusive provider of a specific post-processing method, such as: CNC, dying, painting, polishing, plating, etc., or even Customer support & business acquisition, where a service bureau takes the responsibility of managing all incoming RFQ, providing front-line support and routing of each opportunity to the appropriate member. In each case, this synergy enables each service bureau to leverage the network to maximise their efficiency and ensure that their manpower and resources are always utilised to a maximum, and generating as much revenue as possible. Something that would not be possible if each service bureau were competing for the same opportunities. Keen to learn more ? Contact me and let's have a chat.</p>

<p>In 2015 I wrote a sadly under-read article discussing the looming commoditisation of the 3D printing industry and our hypothesis regarding the industry?s value chain division in three independent added-value segments: application, transactional and production, learn more here. Commoditisation, for those who are unfamiliar with the term, refers to a process in which goods or services become relatively indistinguishable across competing offerings. Traditionally when we think of commodities, we think of things such as: grain, precious metals, oil, orange juice and if you?re Canadian: maple syrup. But in the modern times we live in, this list also includes things such as plastics, chemicals, manufacturing processes, telecommunication and logistics; needless to say, if plastic injection moulding and CNC are commodities, 3D printing will also soon be one. It is our opinion, that for a 3D printing process to be deemed commoditised, it must be shown to be capable of repeatability and reproducibility, or have the demonstrable ability to produce indistinguishable parts over time on the same 3D printer and across different 3D printers in different locations. To this effect, 3D printing processes such as: Stratasys FDM & Polyjet, EOS SLS, 3D Systems MultiJet & SLA and SolidScape SCP (to name a few), already demonstrate this ability to produce near indistinguishable parts. This said, one must be weary, as this indistinguishability does not extend across all 3D printing processes, as identical parts printed through processes such as: 3D System CJP, MCor SDL or low cost FFF differ greatly in quality of their attributes. Process commoditisation is the key enabler behind the ability to 3D print end-use parts, otherwise known as production parts ?in contrast to prototypes which have been driving the 3D printing industry since the 1980s. By this, we do not infer that 3D printed parts are direct replacements or in anyway equivalent to traditionally manufactured parts, but that their properties and behaviors are of a consistent quality, allowing one to design with these considerations in mind and have the confidence to place them in a production environment with the expectation of predictability and reliability. The proliferation, the adoption and the transformation of 3D printing as a viable mean of commercial manufacturing lies entirely in the ability of 3D printing service bureaus & factories to deliver a manufacturing service under a ?cost plus? sales model, where parts are priced in through a predetermined margin over the cost of manufacturing ?as opposed to priced in accordance to the impact they bring to clients and their willingness to pay for the benefit or the service. Achieving commercial viability in a ?cost plus? sales model requires service bureaus & factories to secure sufficient business to maximise throughput and output of their 3D printers, while effectively streamlining its operations to minimise, if not eliminate, every other operational costs (as discussed in this article); thus rendering 3D printing as cost-competitive as possible when compared to traditional manufacturing. Throughput consists of the cm3 per printer-hour, while output consists of the printed cm3 per bulk unit of raw material. A partnership for global impact As a testament to these proposals, UPS, SAP and FastRadius have partnered to launch an on-demand 3D printing manufacturing network focused specifically on delivering an end-to-end digital manufacturing supply chain solution to individuals and companies worldwide. To support this initiative, FastRadius has established one of the industry's most efficient 3D printing facility in Louisville, United-States. One which is so effectively optimised that their 100 Fortus 900MCs are operated and managed by only 3 employees. Furthermore FastRadius has already committed to create a second equally efficient factory in Singapore by the end of 2016, one capable of 24 hour lead-time to delivery. Together combined to create a global additive manufacturing platform which can be leveraged to rival the largest supply chains. Under this arrangement, UPS, SAP and FastRadius will share in the business acquisition responsibilities by delivering targeted value-creating applications leveraging on a global manufacturing platform composed of the FastRadius facilities and more than 60 UPS production/retail points, as illustrated below. Impact on the industry The impact of this business venture, and others of similar nature, on the 3D printing industry will be vast, and will have the potential of transforming how individuals and companies manufacture their prototypes and production parts, and on the opportunity makeup of service bureaus worldwide. For clients The benefits of a global & unified manufacturing platform are without a doubt immense, simplifying everything from supply chain & purchasing to facilitating the transition from prototyping to production all while empowering growth & entry to new markets. Practically speaking, these benefits also translate to: Competitive pricing for both prototypes and production parts; Improved quality and consistency, and Shorter, consistent and predictable lead times. And this across a global production network, offering single point of client contact in a single supplier for all their 3D printing needs. On service bureaus The impact of such a commercial entity on service bureaus are unfortunately far more devastating; especially considering that for many clients, access to this global manufacturing platform will already be seamlessly integrated, supplier verified and vetted in their supply chain, through SAP and UPS, making the choice simpler, faster and immensely more accepted by the corporate pencil pushers that ?improve? our work life. As it is now, from the service bureau?s point of view, opportunities stemming from low value parts and early stage prototypes are already being chipped away by the increased availability and reliability of low cost 3D printers, as previously discussed here, while the proliferation of such a large network will begin chipping away the more lucrative opportunities, thus effectively draining the opportunity pool and making harder for service bureaus to secure sufficient opportunities to thrive and to remain price competitive. Wait, What? It is a well documented fact that service bureaus worldwide already feel the pressure stemming from the aggressive market capturing pricing strategies of Shapeways, i.Materialise and the likes, to which service bureaus respond ?Yes we are more expensive, but we offer?? followed by: advanced post-processing, shorter lead times, better quality, improved customer support, industry specific knowledge, etc. And yes, these were sufficient for service bureaus to gain the upper-hand and secure the business they needed to grow and thrive in the face of price based competition. However, the value proposition brought forward by UPS, SAP and FastRadius, will address many of these key competitive advantages on which service bureaus leveraged to secure sales, such as: lead times and quality, and this delivered at a price-point capable of rivaling Shapeways, i.Materialise and the likes. Thus effectively providing a third option to clients; one which is already seamlessly integrated in their corporate eco-system, that is better or equal to service bureaus in every way, with perhaps the exception of lacking industry specific knowledge and the advanced post-processing developed and perfected in highly specialised service bureaus; consequently draining the opportunity pool from service bureaus worldwide. What can be done? For service bureaus to reinforce their client mandates, maximise their value proposition and maintain their competitive edge over larger players, they must adapt and adopt business and operations models that : Simplifies and streamlines sales acquisition, client communications and operations; Diversifies sales formats and sources (how business is acquired and where it come from), and Creates and derives value from local, and global, 3D printing value networks composed of partners, suppliers and competitors. Part Two of this article will focus on exploring these three points in greater detail, so stay tuned ! Part Two will be published on January 17th 2017, and will be linked here.</p>

<p>This is no time for refusing to look facts in the face, 3D printing technology has evolved to become a robust manufacturing technology, capable of repeatability and reproducibility. No matter the location, the operator or the owner, any two identical 3D printers are able to produce identical parts (with very few exceptions); thus formalising the central dogma of decentralised and distributed manufacturing, driving the future of manufacturing. Capacity, post-processing and expert services aside, the manufacturing consistency of today?s 3D printing technologies provides a level playing field for service bureaus, eliminating the competitive edges that once existed between them, especially between those of a same radius to a client. With quality distinctions no longer being divisive, price is quickly becoming the deciding factor driving purchasing decisions for many clients. And as the industry shifts and 3D printing becomes a commodity (as discussed here and here), a service bureau?s ability to reduce its operational cost becomes a key factor to its ability to compete with lower prices. The status quo Convention is what keeps us together in the face of impending chaos, wise words that advocate steadfastness and reinforces an immunity to change ( also a good book ). In the world of service bureaus, we often hear: ?We can?t keep up with client demand? ?Our staff is soooo busy, we?re turning down business? ?We?re too busy answering emails to even think about business development? ? and many more. All verses that echo steadfastness, and that can be illustrated as: And then there were three: Automate, enhance and outsource Our thesis on operational costs reduction revolves around three methods: Automate: to completely replace a manual process with one that requires no human supervision or intervention, which can be triggered by a specified event, periodically or at the command of an individual; Enhance: to replace a specific subset of the tasks that make up a manual process with capability enhancing tools to maximise the execution efficiency of the given manual process, and Outsource: to delegate non-automatable or enhanceable manual processes and tasks to an external human resource, outsourced or relocated, for execution. The impact of process automation and capability enhancement on a service bureau?s operational expenditure, over a period of 5 years, can be illustrated by this XKCD comic: To this effect, this article aims to explore strategies by which a service bureau can leverage on to automate, enhance or outsource ancillary tasks and business processes. Understanding ancillary costs The bulk of operational expenses in a service bureau stems primarily from two key departments: sales and production. While production costs far supersedes sales, reducing them is done far more effectively and efficiently through factory planning (as discussed in this article) than through automation. Sales on the other hand can be easily automated, enhanced or outsourced, and translates to instant productivity increase and reduce operational costs. To this effect, between August 2015 and March 2016, we have accumulated extensive operational, financial and sentiment data on more that 1200 3D printing service bureaus, amongst the extracted insights we were able to obtain a comprehensive understanding of service bureau sales, their sources and other metrics. As a result of this analysis, we were able to segment sales opportunities in four distinct categories Online Quoting Engine where clients autonomously obtain quotes and order prints online (such as on 3D Print UK); RFQ Forms where clients initiate a transaction by submitting files through a form on a service bureau?s website; Direct Emails where clients initiate a transaction by directly emailing a service bureau?s account manager, and Internal Opportunities where 3D printing services are part of a larger project or a opportunity. In numbers, the opportunities? corresponding conversion rates show an increase the closer the clients are to their account managers, effectively validating the importance of the account manager in 3D printing service sales and pulling up the cost of the service. With regards to the value of automation, if we were were to assume an account manager that earns $ 3 500 / month with a 30% manpower overhead, takes an average of 30 minutes per opportunity (or quote), the average automation opportunity value per quotation issued would be $ 13.125, and with regards the average automation opportunity value of a sale within a specific sales channel: Imagining a service bureau with an established sales mix of 20%, 30%, 40% and 10% in each respective channel, their compounded average automation opportunity value of a sale would amount to: In this example, under these conditions, the expected maximum compounded average automation opportunity value over the course of a year is $ 128 310, or roughly 2.35 full time account managers. But since a service bureau would rather have 3 account managers with capacity to scale, rather than 2 over-worked account managers with no room for more, the effective maximum compounded average automation opportunity value over the course of a year becomes $ 163 800. With these numbers in mind, choosing to eliminate or exclude a sales channel due to low performance or conversion rate won?t push opportunities to more reliable channels. While some opportunities will be carried over, the greater majority of them will be lost as some clients won?t be carried over to these other sales channels. As such the desire to automate, enhance, outsource these opportunities become key to capturing and benefiting from them, without bearing the manpower cost of capturing them. What does automation, enhancements or outsourcing look like? In essence, the primary objective of automation, capability enhancements and outsourcing in a 3D printing service bureau is to minimise the reliance on high-cost local manpower and the bottlenecks they create in sales workflows. In a conventional service bureau setting, all inbound opportunities are funneled to account managers, there to entertain every client regardless of value or importance their associated opportunity brings to the company. This level of service democratisation does have its merits, but it also places high-school students with a $5 phone case at the same level as deep pocketed jet engine manufacturers. Combined with the tidal wave of tire kickers and quote collectors, account managers quickly become overwhelmed and incapable of offering the attention and consideration high value clients and opportunities require, stemming business intake and impeding a service bureau?s ability to sustain and grow. If we consider the opportunities across these four sales channels, our statistics show an average of 15 to 20 % is made up of low value opportunities that can be fully automated, directly (through an online quoting engine) or indirectly following an initial automated pre-processing. Of the remaining 80 to 85 % of opportunities, 70 to 75 % represent run of the mill opportunities that require very little attention, while the remaining 10 to 15 % represent key or strategic opportunities that require extensive attention and consideration by high value adding localized team members. In other words, the average service bureau has the opportunity to either automate and/or outsource 85 to 90 % of all sales opportunities, drastically reducing the cost of sales while at the same time increasing the client facing bandwidth. In this optimal scenario, low-value opportunities are fully automated, run-of-the-mill opportunities are outsourced to capability enhanced external resources while opportunities stemming from key accounts and other strategic opportunities are managed internally by capability enhanced local resources. Beyond the sales organisation, a service bureau can also leverage on outsourcing and relocation to reduce the costs of other core activities such as engineering services, design and other pre-fabrication tasks like file repair, build tray preparation, etc. Getting started The key to successfully automate, enhance or outsource tasks and workflows in a service bureau is identifying the most inefficient or costly manual task or process, dealing with it and growing efficiency around it until the web of tasks and processes stemming from it are as efficient and cost effective as possible. The first step in this transformation is understanding the types of incoming opportunities, the expected service level and the workflows and processes in place to fulfil and deliver on them. Once these workflows and processes have been identified, broken down in their constituting tasks and costed, opportunities for automation, enhancements and outsourcing can be identified, ranked and prioritised. The end result of this decomposition enables service bureaus to: Automate: workflows and processes composed entirely of automatable tasks and replace them with orchestrated services; Enhance: the execution efficiency of manual workflows and processes with capability enhancing tools by automating low value adding ancillary tasks, and Outsource: non-automatable, or enhanceable, manual processes and tasks to an external human resource, either outsourced or relocated, for execution. What can be automated ? The 3D printing industry?s highly digitalised workflows, create a unique opportunity for service bureaus, and all other beneficiaries of the technology, to automate a great number of tasks like, for example:: Price computation, quoting, ordering and payment; COGS, consumable and printing time computation; Manufacturability and design rule verifications; CAD format conversion and mesh repair; Opportunity ranking and routing; ? and more. These workflows can be triggered automatically on a specified event, according to a monitored threshold, periodically or manually. What can be enhanced ? As many activities in a service bureau require human involvement, not all workflows can be fully automated. Consequently automating key tasks of a manual workflow will increase manpower effectiveness and productivity, especially in workflows such as: Client relationships and communications; Opportunity management and manual quotations; Production management, part tracking and routing; Part identification and part to order pairing (e.g. during unpacking); QA, packing, handling and shipping; ? and more. Consequently these capability enhancements can be leveraged on as pre- or post-processors of manual workflows or as assistive tools accelerating the execution of a manual process. What can be outsourced ? Finally, outsourcing can be leveraged to cost cutting transformation to address the few remaining ancillary workflows that can?t be automated or sufficiently enhanced to make them cost effective. These activities include all of the above enhanced workflows as well as: Design and engineering services; Design feedback and support to clients; Build tray / volume preparation; Part serialisation and texturing (advanced Materialise Magics and 3-matic work); Advanced mesh repair (shelling, drain hole placement, re-triangulation, etc); ? and more. Now what ? For the last few years we?ve been working in preparation to the 3D printing industry commoditization, ensuring that 3D printing service bureaus have the necessary infrastructure in place to thrive with a net profit margin trending towards 7 to 12%. We?ve built Fabnami, which in a few complicated words, is a cloud based service orchestration platform focused on delivering fully configurable, customisable and custom solutions addressing the specific needs of 3D printing service bureaus, with regards to sales, operations, service delivery, production & infrastructure management and other supporting activities. With an install base processing upwards of 175 000 STL & CAD files a month, Fabnami has grown to become one of the leading enterprise solutions for 3D printing service bureaus, delivering an ecosystem that integrates several external services and solutions making Fabnami capable of delivering an all-encompassing seamless platform that interconnects every aspect of a modern 3D printing service bureau. Over the course of the last few months, we?ve taken it a step further beyond software and infrastructure, and started addressing the biggest bottleneck in every 3D printing service bureau: manpower, its cost and the talent scarcity, or lack thereof. Introducing 3DO.am, a soon to be launched B2B platform that provides service bureaus with access to cost effective fractional manpower to handle ancillary activities such as customer support, quoting, file repair, design and build tray / volume preparation. As a service, 3DO.am works via Fabnami as a dispatcher of ad-hoc tasks, in a fashion similar to Amazon?s Mechanical Turk, routing tasks to a single individual or to a pool of white listed individuals, in accordance to the type of tasks and to the routing rules specific to each service bureau. Furthermore, as 3DO.am is seamlessly integrated with Fabnami?s orchestrated services and automation platform, tasks can also be dispatched at the click of a button from the order manager, or at any point in any Fabnami powered workflow. The objective of 3DO.am is to provide service bureaus with access to manpower at roughly 50% of their current local manpower costs, which in Europe would be roughly ? 1250 - 1750 per FTE-month (for a mechanical engineer with training in 3DP), by leveraging on qualified manpower from emerging markets in Southeast Asia (and eventually South-America, and eastern Europe). At this point and time, in the ramp-up of 3DO.am?s platform, we are seeking a partnership with an established service bureau (preferably in the GMT+7 to GMT+10 time-zones) to demonstrate the value added manpower outsourcing brings to a service bureau and to collaborate on establishing outsourcing standards that will define the platforms best practices and key areas of focus. As such, if you want to be involved in this venture, please email us. We are looking for partners who want to join us in taking the 3D printing industry to the next level while creating high value opportunities for people in emerging markets. This article is a follow up to our initial overtures to outsourcing: ?Talk is Cheap? by Ki Chong Tran "Field of 3D Printed Dreams" by Benoit Valin "Outside of the Cube" by Ki Chong Tran These articles are precursors to the soft launch of 3DO.am, our new 3D printing technical and business process outsourcing platform where our objective is to provide 3D printing service bureaus with access to cost effective fractional manpower to handle things like customer support, file repair, design and build tray preparation etc. Our 3DO.am platform will be leveraging on many of the service orchestration, model manipulation and AI features developed by Fabnami to streamline the outsourcing process and ensure the fluidity of the service bureau operation and integration of remote workers.</p>

<p>It?s a common belief that a 3D printer will drive a herd of clients your way, each ready and willing to line your pockets with immeasurable wealth. In reality, you?re not Kevin Costner and you?re not trying to lure baseball players to your backyard, simply building it won?t make them come. The business of 3D printing The underlying business model of a 3D printing service bureau is called: ?Art-To-Part?, which consists of generating profits over materials and machine time. To succeed with this business model, a service bureau must secure sufficient business to maximise throughput and output of their 3D printers while minimising, if not eliminating, every other operational costs (as discussed in this article). Throughput consists of the cm3 per printer-hour, while output consists of the printed cm3 per bulk unit of raw material. In theory, the business model is fool-proof, the insatiable demand for 3D printing combined with the supernumerary industry growth forecasts should make any business venture successful. In reality, the market saturated too quickly, the over-supply triggered race-to-the-bottom and left many service bureaus grasping at straws trying reach this profitable efficiency, struggling to break-even, sustain and grow. Market realities It is an absolute certainty that 3D printing will evolve to become a prevalent mean of commercial manufacturing, where individual consumers will interact with 3D printed parts on a daily basis and benefit from the technology in so many other aspects of their lives. This said, while this great revolution is happening, the service bureau industry that has been shouldering this transformation is starving and struggling to stay alive. We say this because, historically, the service bureau industry has been driven by one-offs and prototypes, which were individually priced in accordance to the impact they brought to a client and their willingness to pay for the benefit. This high profit scenario put very little pressure on the service bureaus to minimise their costs and optimise their business processes, and instead the market self-regulated upwards to bear the high cost of the service. Unfortunately, market saturation combined with the rise in availability and adoption of low cost 3D printers (on the end-consumer, startup and SME fronts), have let these one-offs and prototypes business segments to almost completely disappear (with the exception of niche industries such as automotive, aerospace, etc.), leaving many service bureaus with the burden of maintaining a high operation expenditure baselines, while experiencing a decrease in revenue and thinning profit margins, barely enough to make ends meet. This pain, contrary to popular belief, is not an indicator of the decrease in demand of 3D printing, but a shift in the type of demand; moving away from one-offs and prototypes towards short series and small lot productions. The pivot We believe this new type of demand will be responsible for driving the industrialisation of 3D printing technologies, enabling them to move downstream and bridge the growing gap to mass manufacturing, thus fulfilling the prophecy. In this industrialised economy, the role of the service bureau will pivot to become mini-factories focused quasi-exclusively on short series and small lot production for a B2B client base. Effectively reducing or eliminating their dependency on one-offs and prototypes, and instead leveraging the remnant business to optimise their build volumes (as discussed in this article). To win, service bureaus will need to adapt their market offering to capture these types of opportunities and bring forward operational changes that will enable them to be competitive in this new paradigm. Consequently, service bureaus incapable of pivoting, in time or at all, will see their pains amplified and force them to diversify their value proposition in other ways to stay afloat. Pivoting strategies Business development and go-to-market strategies aside, successfully pivoting to address the needs of short series and small lot production requires a service bureau to streamline its operations and business processes to achieve commercial viability in a context where gross profit margin trends towards 10 to 15%, in line with traditional part manufacturing industries. Achieving commercial viability under these conditions will effectively industrialise 3D printing and make it a true viable option for commercial manufacturing. Unlike traditional part manufacturing industries, which cuts costs primarily by relocating production to low cost regions while maintaining sales and support in close proximity to clients; the benefits of 3D printing are only maximised when production is maintained in proximity to the client. Consequently limiting the 3D printing industry from cutting costs in a similar fashion, which also artificially re-enforces the justification of high service cost. This said, unlike traditional part manufacturing industries, the 3D printing industry benefits from highly digitalised client-facing workflows, creating the opportunity to automate and outsource, or relocate, activities such as sales, support and services to low cost regions, effectively reducing operational costs and providing service bureaus the flexibility needed to become a competitively priced mean of commercial manufacturing. Automating, outsourcing or relocating Leveraging on automation to lower operational bottom-lines has been the driving mantra of Fordism since, well, the time of Henry Ford. This said, no matter how impactful automation has been shown to help large manufacturers reduce their costs, small manufactures are still struggling with its fundamentals and in many cases are even uncertain how to proceed or get started with it. In essence, the primary objective of automation in a 3D printing service bureau is to minimise the reliance on manpower and the bottlenecks they create, both in securing revenue generating opportunities and in delivering on them. In a conventional service bureau setting, all inbound opportunities are funneled to account managers, there to entertain every client regardless of value or importance their associated opportunity brings to the company. This level of service democratisation does have its merits, but it also places high-school students with a $5 phone case at the same level as deep pocketed jet engine manufacturers. Combined with the tidal wave of tire kickers and quote collectors, account managers quickly become overwhelmed and incapable of offering the attention and consideration high value clients and opportunities require, stemming business intake and impeding a service bureau?s ability to sustain and grow. To successfully implement an automation and outsourcing strategy, key workflows, processes and tasks must first be identified, divided into their constituent parts then ranked according to their suitability to automation or outsourcing. To illustrate this process, let?s imagine segmenting the source of sales opportunities in a service bureau in four distinct categories: Touchless web-sales where clients autonomously order prints online (such as on Shapeways, Materialise, etc); RFQ Forms where clients initiate a transaction by submitting files through a form on a service bureau?s website; Direct Emails where clients initiate a transaction by directly emailing a service bureau?s account manager, and Internal Opportunities where 3D printing services are part of a larger project or an opportunity. Across these four sales channels, our statistics show an average of 15 to 20 % is made up of low value opportunities that can be fully automated, directly (through a touchless web-sales portal) or indirectly following an initial automated pre-processing. Of the remaining 80 to 85 % of opportunities, 70 to 75 % represent run of the mill opportunities that require very little attention, while the remaining 10 to 15 % represent key or strategic opportunities requiring extensive attention and consideration by high value adding localized team members. In other words, 85 to 90 % of all sales opportunities can be either automated and/or outsourced, in turn drastically reducing the cost of sales while increasing the client facing bandwidth. With this in mind, the first step in automating a service bureau revolves around the integration of unsupervised opportunity pre-processors to handle all inbound requests, automatically validating, ranking, routing and re-routing opportunities through the most effective pathways. Winning opportunities by either delegating them to a fully automated order fulfilment platform or to an internal, or external, account manager for tailored support. As a capability enhancing tool, automation can be leveraged on to streamline tasks and workflows to instantly boost manpower productivity and throughput, while delivering consistency and repeatability across clients, account managers and locales. And, when tasks can?t be automated or augmented, outsourcing can then be leveraged on as a cost mitigating solution to further reduce non-automatable costs. Beyond the sales organisation, a service bureau can also leverage on outsourcing and relocation to reduce the costs of other core activities such as engineering services, design and other pre-fabrication workflows and tasks like file repair, build tray preparation, etc. By addressing cost centers in their sales and production organisations, service bureaus enter a revitalised position and become able to compete much more aggressively on opportunities that would normally be captured by traditional manufacturers: short series and small lots. This flexibility enables them to safely move their value proposition further downstream, focusing on the type of clients and opportunities that will sustain their business for years to come. A transformed industry As a result of this transformation the future service bureau industry will be separated into three types of businesses: Massive ultra-efficient online ?Art-to-Part? 3D printing services to handle low value opportunities (phone cases and other trinkets) at rock bottom prices, such as Shapeways, Materialise, etc; Service bureaus highly specialised in the production of one-offs and prototypes for specific niche industries, such as automotive, aerospace, medical, etc, and Service bureaus focused on delivering cost effective commercial manufacturing solutions, as an alternative for mass manufacturing, for short series and small lots production. All able to leverage on automation, outsourcing or relocation to reduce their operational costs, while increasing consistency and maximising efficiency. If you want to be involved in this venture, please email us. We are looking for partners in North America and Europe who want to join us in taking the 3D printing industry to the next level while creating opportunities for people in all parts of the world. This article is a follow up to our initial overture, ?Talk is Cheap? by Ki Chong Tran, discussing the opportunities 3DO.am aims to create, and how they can be leveraged to satisfy the manpower needs of 3D printing service bureaus, while creating meaningful employment opportunities in emerging markets. These articles are precursors to the soft launch of 3DO.am, our new 3D printing technical and business process outsourcing platform where our objective is to provide 3D printing service bureaus with access to cost effective fractional manpower to handle things like customer support, file repair, design and build tray preparation etc. Our 3DO.am platform will be leveraging on many of the service orchestration, model manipulation and AI features developed by Fabnami to streamline the outsourcing process and ensure the fluidity of the service bureau operation and integration of remote workers.</p>

<p>Following the publication of "Five Strategies to Cut-Down Your 3D Printing Operational Costs" in November 2015, multiple readers contacted us to help them estimate their own quoting expenditures and possible quote automation savings. As a result, we have made available this simple cost calculator, taking into account current Fabnami Pay-As-You-Quote service fees. Try it here and see how much money you could be better spending on business development, marketing and on other revenue generating activities. Fabnami is an advanced e-commerce solution for 3D-printing bureaus. Fabnami works in close collaboration with our clients to develop leading-edge algorithms, web applications and service to power the growth of 3D-printing.</p>

<p>It is now beyond doubt that 3D printing is moving into the next stage of its existence, having matured as a technology and stabilized as a means of prototype manufacturing. Companies are no longer afraid to jump on the FDM wagon, as printers have become more reliable, better performing, and way more productive than they used to be. All of this combined marks a new age in the evolution of the technology, as we enter the dawn of massive 3D printing utilization. However, 3D printing has been a relatively untested technology so far, and, if we really want to make it work for us in the most beneficial way, we need to fit it into the context of established manufacturing methodologies and standard practices. Companies that decide to empower their production through the implementation of 3D printers need to focus on ways to implement production enhancing techniques deriving from Six Sigma and lean manufacturing methodologies. With all of the things that can be materialized nowadays inside a 3D printer?s chamber, one has to seriously think about clever ways to make the entire process workflow more efficient. Each company may develop different strategies depending on their particular needs, but there are some general points that could apply everywhere and to everyone out there. We asked the team at Fabnami, an online platform built to support any company in easily implementing and offering 3D printing services, to analyze and explain some virtuous practices that, according to their experience in this field, bureaus can adopt to optimize the process and thus maximize earnings. Here are some examples: Waste Waste is a primary economic and environmental concern when having to work with many printers in a production plant. Finding ways to minimize it and to even recycle excess materials if possible would be crucial to the overall efficiency of the plant. Good preparation and testing will determine exactly how much filament is needed with high accuracy. removal Simultaneous Printing If a printer can print one thing at cost ?a?, and two things at ?<2a?, then it?s obvious that services should take on multi-printing. If the printing chambers are large enough, one could build multiple items at once, essentially reducing the cost of manufacturing for each product. Maybe this would require the delayed delivery of an order, until another one comes in. As long as logical thresholds are set, a company can only benefit from this clever technique. Sculpteo-pigs Human Resources As is the case in mechanical engineering workshops with automated CNCs, the less human labor is involved in the manufacturing process, the lower the overall cost. Employees are nice to have around, but they need salaries, training expenses, equipment costs, legislative requirements, coordination, etc. Buy a fully automated FDM machine and let it operate as many hours as needed, during holidays, weekends, nighttime, or whenever else. When something goes wrong, they can send a notification to a center of operations so that a technician can visit the machine to solve the problem.Concept Laser Factory No Scaffolding There are technologies that don?t require any scaffolding to be generated and printed for the build to get the required support. Unlike FDM and SLA/DLP technologies, SLS (laser sintering), CJP (Color Jet Printing, a type of binder jetting by 3D Systems), 3DP (another form of binder jetting from ExOne and Digital Metals) and SDL (a paper based lamination technology by Mcor Technologies) are known to produce self-supported builds. Even if no other technology is available, simply rotating and angling the object could drastically reduce support material requirements. This could contribute to drastically reducing costs due to the much lower amount of filament used in a production plant. cideas05-e1430333641514-1024x728 While most of those operating a 3D printing bureau for sometime will have already encountered most of these issues, sometimes hearing it from an external source, especially for the many that are just getting involved, even some basic free advice can make a difference. For everything else, there?s Fabnami. *Article written in collaboration with Benoit Valin (Fabnami) and Bill Toulas</p>

<p>One could argue that 3D printing technologies do not adhere to the fundamental principles of traditional manufacturing, especially with respect to aspects of manufacturing economics and operations, such as the principles surrounding economies of scale and factory organisation & operations. It is often stipulated that ?economies of scale do not apply to 3D printing as there is no mandatory minimum order quantity?, or ?as each part is unique, pricing should be set based on perceived value to the end-user and not as a direct function of manufacturing effort?, or even ?as the requirements for each 3D printed parts is unique operational efficiency is unattainable?, etc. This said, it is our opinion that during the process of commoditisation, 3D printing technologies will adhere, in their own way, to the fundamental principles of traditional manufacturing, and will in turn debunk the statements above, to the benefit of the beneficiaries. You can read our thoughts on the matter of industry commoditisation in part 1: ?The Journey Towards 3D Printing Industry Commoditisation? In this article we explore, what we believe to be, the most effective operational strategies that can be leveraged to achieve and maintain commercial viability and increased profitability within a commoditised 3D printing industry. We believed that diligent implementation of these strategies will lead to compatibilisation of 3D printing technologies with the fundamental principles of traditional manufacturing; thus enabling to maximise the scope, breadth and impact 3D printing has on humankind. The strategies explored in this article can be summarised by the following four axioms: To be effective, human involvement must be reduced to a minimum; To be efficient, every process must in turn be efficient; To be economical, waste must be reduced to a minimum, and To be commercially viable, an organisation must be effective, efficient and economical. Strategy 1: Sales Process Automation The 3D printing service sales process is unpredictably complex and comprises of multiple manpower intensive tasks, such as: mesh verification & repair, manufacturability validation, cost estimation, quotation, invoicing and payment, as well as pre-sales & customer support. In the best of cases this workflow is performed only once per sale, however, in reality, it can be performed multiple time before a purchase decision is made, regardless of the outcome. This said, as with any manpower dependent activity, automating the sales process will effectively reduce the associated manpower, and in turn have a direct impact on cost minimisation. To illustrate the impact of manpower on sales process costs, the example below has been prepared. Sales process automation has as objective to minimise manpower involvement in client interactions. It is our experience that through adoption of an online e-commerce platform, such as Fabnami (fabnami.com), up to 80% of sales opportunities can be fully automated; this includes pre & post sales tasks such as mesh verification & repair, manufacturability validation, cost estimation, quotation, invoicing and payment. As a result of sales process automation, only higher value opportunities, those that fall outside of the norm (large parts or specific manufacturing requirements), will need to be handed by manually. Strategy 2: Build Platforms Optimisation When considering build platform optimisation, we must optimise both time and waste. The time optimisation component of the equation consists of maximising the cm3 throughput per printer-hour, while the waste optimisation component consists of maximising the cm3 throughput per bulk unit of raw material. When considering time, we must first understand the different types of 3D printing production cycles, where every 3D printing technology can be characterised by one of the following three statements : Linear by part production cycles, where the print-cycle increases linearly with the number of parts being concurrently printed, (such as FDM, SLA, DMLS, Inkjet, LOM, SDL etc.); Linear by height production cycles, where the print-cycle increases linearly with the increase in height of the print volume, regardless of the number of parts being concurrently printed (such as SLS*, DLP, MSLA, etc.), and Negative logarithmic production cycles, where the compounded print-cycle decreases logarithmically with every additional part concurrently printed on the same jetting band, (such as Polyjet, Multijet CJP, 3DP, etc.). Subsequent to the print cycle, we must also understand the different types of 3D printing build topologies, where every 3D printing technology can be classified by either : Self-supported builds, where the printed parts do not require any form of scaffolding to secure them in place during the build process. (such as SLS, CJP, 3DP, LOM, SDL, etc.), and Supported builds, where the printed parts require scaffolding to secure them in place during the build process (such as FDM, SLA, DMLS, Polyjet, Multijet, Inkjet, DLP, MSLA, etc.). Consequently, when preparing a build platform we must either maximise density of the X and Y surface area to optimise supported builds or maximise density of the X, Y and Z volume to optimise self-supported builds. Combining our understanding of both production cycles and build topology we can effectively devise a time optimisation strategy that will maximise the cm3 throughput of a printer. As a result of optimising both time components in each build, the printers? amortisation cost per cm3 of parts delivered will be minimised. Having optimised time, we must then optimise waste to maximise the production throughput per bulk unit of raw material. Waste is produced in one of two ways: Unavoidable waste, occurring as a result of bounded support structures, where material not belonging to the part is used during the manufacturing process, and later disposed of (such as FDM, SLA, DMLS, Polyjet, Multijet, Inkjet, DLP, MSLA, etc.), and Avoidable waste, occurring as a result of suboptimal build platform preparation, where unused material used during the printing process cannot be recycled, whether it be completely, partially or at all (such as SLS, LOM, SDL, etc.). Unavoidable waste can be instantly minimised at the part level by optimising the orientation of each part on the build platform to reduce the use of support structures. This said, as 3D printed parts are not isotropic, doing so may significantly affect the mechanical properties of the par, as such minimising unavoidable waste should be applied wisely. Avoidable waste, on the other-hand, is minimised at the build platform level, where each part being concurrently produced contribute to an increase, or a decrease, of the overall waste production. To effectively minimise avoidable waste, build platform density must be maximised, where build platform density is computed as follows: This can be achieved by reducing the overall build height for a given set of parts, thus increasingly distributing the parts across the X-Y plane and in turn increasing build platform density. Tip: If the number of parts in the job queue are not sufficient to populate the build platform to an optimise level, one can choose to extend the production schedule to accommodate parts from additional clients, or print sample parts or material swatches. It is also important to note that there is a density threshold at which point some technology may be unable to produce parts reliability, such is the case for SLS where a density above 8% often leads to failed builds, as such we recommend experimenting with low value or low priority parts to determine the optimal build platform density for your printer(s). You can read our thoughts on the matter of part nesting best practices in part 3: ? Nesting detection for advanced SLS pricing ? Strategy 3: Profitable Production Scheduling Production scheduling impacts both an organisation operational costs as well as its ability to generate revenue. In the 3D printing industry profit is maximised when each printer is producing optimal build platforms day and night, seven days a week. This said, realities of the industry do not permit this level of operational optimisation and require service bureaus to schedule their production to maximise profit. To leverage a production schedule for profit, the following provisions can be made: Maximising unmanned production, utilising unstaffed periods, such as: weekends, nights, lunch breaks and/or shift changes, to perform automated tasks, such as printing and soaking, to avoid manpower busy-wait; Delaying jobs, delaying job commencement to include additional parts to the build, in turn further optimising the build platform; Backwards planning, loading the build platforms so their print cycles complete at a specific time, preferably minutes before the commencement of the first shift or with sufficient time to unload and start a new job before the end of the last shift, thus maximising manpower utilisation and minimising overtime; Batching manual work, batching manual tasks that when executed concurrently, or sequentially, take less time to perform, then when they are executed in multiple work efforts. such as pre & post-processing, and Building in flexibility, 3D printing has the unique value of being able to instantly produce parts in very short lead-times, this aid to maximise the profitability of a production schedule queue hopping opportunities must be built in to accommodate same-day and overnight higher value jobs. Strategy 4: Factory Planning The 3D printing revolution evangelists talk of "tooling-free manufacturing", "unsupervised manufacturing", "multiple different parts manufactured concurrently" and so on, all of which is true and to our great benefit. Unfortunately, the processes performed once the parts are out of the printer(s) are extremely manual, labour-intensive, inefficient, informal and relatively arbitrary in nature. Optimising these processes becomes key to efficiency and mitigating operational costs. Optimising the part and process flows within the production floor is done is the same way as in traditional manufacturing industries, and one could choose to implement methodologies such as the Toyota Production System and 6S (which is 5S + Safety). These formal methodologies aside, there are few simple considerations that can be quickly implemented and have immediate impact on production efficiency. Motion grouping The concept of motion grouping addresses "unnecessary motions" on the production floor, one of the Seven Wastes of the Toyota Production System, where activities that are always performed sequentially are physically located sequentially with ergonomic and natural transitions between them. By grouping motions logically and sequentially, traveling and lifting will be minimised, thus enabling a higher manual processing throughput. Triage The concept of triage addresses excess "transportation" across the production floor, another of the Seven Wastes of the Toyota Production System, where parts and humans, move across the production floor from point of added-value to point of added-value, avoiding any unnecessary detour or handling that could slow down the production or damage parts. Implementing a triage strategy will reduce foot traffic on the production floor, simplify part/order tracking and limit the opportunities for errors to occur. Example of triage: Effective movements between printing, post-processing, packaging: where parts that do not require post-processing are sent directly to packaging, while parts that require post-processing are sent to the right post-processing queue directly. Post-processing stations Deploying post-process specific 5S compliant stations addresses the "inappropriate processing" of parts, another of the Seven Wastes of the Toyota Production System, where a task specific station is equipped with only the necessary tools & devices needed to perform a pre-defined set of manipulations, each with their own completion and quality criteria. Doing so will not only improve part quality and consistency, by ensuring that each part is post-processed in the same way, but it will also improve throughput and reduce defects by removing guesswork and improvisations when a part is being post-processed. Other factory planning strategies There are countless other factory planning strategies that can be applicable to the process flows of a 3D printing factory, doing so will not only improve throughput and quality while reducing operational costs, it will also narrow the gap that separates the operations of additive manufacturing industry to those of traditional manufacturing industries. Strategy 5: Effective Supply Chain Management Developing a 3D printing service (internal or external) consist primarily of understanding the needs of a target client base and acquiring & commissioning the technologies, materials and secondary processes needed to deliver the services that best meet their needs. This said, regardless of the planning, preparation and readiness levels, there is a guarantee, a certainty, that requests will be made that falls outside of this scope of capabilities. As it is impossible to continuously develop one's service and capability footprint, developing an effective supply chain to accommodate these odd jobs is essential to delivering a complete service offering. Tip: In a commercial setting, it is to the advantage of a service bureau to accept requests for quotation and orders that fall outside of their scope of capabilities, but within their target market / client base, and in turn finding another service bureau that is able of delivering this service. Not doing so forces clients to further develop their own supply chain, thus diluting the service bureaus' share ownership of said clients? business. Furthermore, it could also mean forever losing said clients other service bureaus that can deliver this service, and possibly be also capable of delivering all the services of the first. Considering this eventuality, balancing insourced capabilities with those outsourced to a supply chain becomes key to commercial viability and profitability of an operation. However, contrary to business process outsourcing, which focuses primarily on displacing activities to foreign lands offering financial, and/or other, incentives, outsourcing 3D printing and its supporting activities consists primarily of establishing a commercial relationship with another local, or regional, service provider, for whose operational costs are also bound by the same, or similar, commercial constraints and parameters. All things considered, the flexibility provided by a supply chain allows one to leverage on a capability without being liable for the fixed cost of ownership, and instead perceiving this capability as a demand driven variable cost which can be eliminated at anytime if need be. Through outsourcing, in-house capabilities can be effectively augmented to include: Materials Technologies Secondary processes Build volumes Precision & surface finishes With this in mind, choosing which technology, material or secondary process to outsource becomes a balancing act between costs and client expectations, which can unfortunately lead to insourcing a capability that makes more financial sense to outsource (a necessary evil of our industry). Tip: When developing a 3D printing service, we recommend to initially outsource the entirety of the production, focus on developing the business model(s) and understand the need of the client base. As the production needs are formalised, we suggest to develop the in-house capabilities that best meet the primary needs, while maintaining a healthy supply chain to satisfy the secondary and tertiary needs. In Summary In this article we have explored multiple strategies which can be employed to reduce operational costs, maximise profitability and improve efficiency in a 3D printing factory. There are many other strategies that could be employed, and perhaps be even more applicable to your specific operational structure and business model(s). Inspiring yourselves from strategies found in the traditional manufacturing industry will not only further improve your profitability, but also enable your production line to remain profitable when 3D printing becomes a commodity, a fact that we believe to be imminent.</p>

<p>We are currently witnessing an insatiable demand for 3D printing at every level of the value chain, across all industries and in all locales, while concurrently observing an alarming decrease in new professional system sales. This dichotomy suggest that there is a significant excess in production capacity in today?s 3D printing ecosystem, leading us to believe that the 3D printing industry is entering a new stage of its evolution: commoditisation or - if we use internet terminology - 3D printing 2.0. We hypothesise that in this new phase an increasing amount of beneficiaries will choose primarily to adopt low-cost & entry level 3D printers to handle their day-to-day 3D printing needs, while leveraging on service bureaus to satisfy their higher-value 3D printing production, such as for large parts, small lots, high precision, specific materials or finishing and post & secondary processing, etc. As a result of this surge in outsourcing, service bureaus will start facing increasing stress at every level of their organisation, from client base segmentation to increased competition, to shorter lead-time expectations and to thinner profit margins. Thus, to thrive in this new landscape, service bureaus will need to automate many client-facing & pre-production workflows, adopt best-in-class 3D printing operation & production strategies, develop rich supply chains on which to outsource low-value and low-frequency activities, all that while concurrently implementing effective manufacturing methodologies and adopting production-enhancing attitudes to maintain operational efficiency and to be able to deliver an effective service to their client base. We further hypothesise that, as the shift towards commoditisation occurs, the 3D printing industry will specialise in three independent added-value segments: application, transactional and production, each with well defined centres of expertise with their respective quantifiable and qualifiable metrics and standards. Application : An application is an added-value activity that leverages 3D printing to deliver a product or a service to internal or external, clients. Examples include: spare parts, virtual warehousing, topology optimisation, marketplace, figurines, mass-customized goods, design etc. Production : Production is the implementation of the art-to-part business model, that produces parts from 3D printable CAD models (STLs and the likes) via a 3D printing manufacturing process, to the benefit of internal, or external, clients. Transactional : The transactional layer is the collection of processes that carries the ?art? across the entire manufacturing process, bridging an application to production. This includes activities such as: model conversion (CAD-to-STL), mesh repair, cost estimation, order management, build planning, scheduling, and the likes. In today?s ecosystem, applications and production segments are co-dependant, whereby the application provider leverages their internal production capabilities to fulfil its services, or inversely, production facilities leverages on their applications to drive production demand. However functional and effective this model is, it is our opinion that it is also limiting the scope, the breadth and impact Additive Manufacturing technologies have on humankind. This said, over the course of the last year, this co-dependence is slowly being disrupted by new fabless 3D printing applications, wherein the application provider leverages external production capabilities to fulfil its services, completely eliminating the need of 3D printer ownership. It is our belief that this fabless model will soon become the fastest growing and most lucrative segment of the industry. Which, in turn, will further drive the commoditisation of the industry and lead to the establishment of a transactional added-value segment, focused on bridging said applications with external production facilities, in the most efficient and cost effective way. It is in this transactional added-value segment that Fabnami (fabnami.com) operates. The Fabnami platform provides flexible integration possibilities with the application providers? business workflows, while enabling service bureaus to accurately compute 3D printing costs on the fly for any given 3D printable model, using any 3D printing technology/processes created by any equipment manufacturer, thus effectively bridging the application and the production added-value segments. About Fabnami: The Fabnami e-commerce platform (fabnami.com) automates the client-facing and pre-production business processes of 3D-printing service bureaus. Its features include mesh visualisation, quoting, payment & invoicing, as well as order management and CRM. Fabnami streamlines most production processes and let service bureaus operate with increased efficiency at reduced operational costs. You can read our thoughts on effective factory operations in a commoditised industry in Part 2: ? Five Strategies to Cut-Down Your 3D Printing Operational Costs ? </p>

<p>Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) is an additive manufacturing process that uses a laser to sinter powdered materials. By aiming the laser at points in space defined by a 3D model, the print material is sintered to create a solid structure. The relative low cost of SLS materials, such as the Nylon-12 used by EOS P-series printers (compared to other 3D-printable materials), combined with the SLS process ability to produce parts without requiring any support structures (during the manufacturing, the parts are surrounded by unsintered powder at all times), makes SLS printing one of the most impactful technology in the 3D printing industry. The cost of SLS prints is primarily determined by three parameters: the print duration (also called machine-time), which is strongly correlated with the vertical dimension of the 3D-model in the print volume, the part volume and the space it occupies in the printer. These characteristics allow for the creation of simple cost structures and pricing policies based solely on a 3D-model?s bounding-box volume, which is a used as a proxy for the machine-time as well as for the occupied print volume. By using a bounding-box driven pricing model, combined with best in class reliability and quality, 3DPrintUK?s founder Nick Allen succeeded in making 3DPrintUK one of the most successful British 3D-printing service bureaus. As 3D-printing becomes more affordable, larger and larger models are being submitted for print, which creates opportunities to optimize the build volume utilization by allowing smaller models to be printed within larger, hollow ones. This procedure, which is commonly called nesting, results in improved throughput at little additional cost. Build volume optimization is one of the most efficient strategies to cut down 3D printing operational costs. Read more about it in Five Strategies to Cut-Down Your 3D Printing Operational Costs. Working with the pros Through a collaboration with Nick Allen and his team at 3DPrintUK?s South Bermondsey 3D-printing facility, Fabnami?s co-founder and Head of Research Claudio Felicioli was able to develop an effective methodology to evaluate in real-time the possibility to nest small models within a larger, hollow one, thus allowing for a more accurate and lower pricing of large, hollow 3D-models. 3DPrintUK's website provides a clear explanation on how to nest parts to decrease manufacturing prices. As a result, Fabnami?s core quoting engine has been enhanced to automatically and instantly evaluate nesting opportunities on every part submitted for quotation, ensuring that each quote provided is as accurate as possible. Key Fabnami users such as 3DPrintUK and Sliced3D, a Melbourne-based 3D-design and printing bureau, will soon leverage on this new feature to further meet their clients expectations in terms of 3D printing affordability and price point competitiveness. The Fabnami nesting-detection algorithm To nest smaller models into a larger, hollow one, the latter must have at least one opening large enough to allow the smaller objects out once the printing is done. Fabnami?s nesting-detection algorithm finds out whether a model is hollow and has at least one opening with diameter not smaller than a given threshold, typically a little more than the minimum size needed to extract the largest nested object. If the model fulfills the requirements for nesting, its price will be based on its own volume or will otherwise fall back to the default bounding-box based price. The following screenshots show how Fabnami?s nesting-detection works on a fairly complex hollow model with several openings of different sizes: after closing all openings larger than a threshold and filling all resulting enclosed volumes, our algorithm computes the best price for the resulting 3D-model, which accounts for the possibility of nesting smaller models into it. The original 3D-model. Note that the model is hollow and has a large number of openings of different sizes. Small objects can be nested into this hollow duck. The algorithm-internal representation of the original model after applying the algorithm with a 1 mm opening size threshold. A few openings have been removed, but the model is still hollow and small parts can be nested into it. The algorithm-internal representation of the original model after applying the algorithm with a 10 mm opening size threshold. All openings have been removed, the model is no longer hollow and can be priced as a solid. Fabnami is an advanced e-commerce solution for 3D-printing bureaus. We work in close collaboration with our clients to develop leading-edge algorithms, web applications and service to power the growth of 3D-printing.</p>

<p> Pretty much like flossing, removing support material from a freshly 3D-printed object is a necessary nuisance. The role of support material is to give - as it can be easily expected - support to overhanging surfaces, which would otherwise collapse during the manufacturing process. Some additive manufacturing technologies, notably SLS, are self-supporting in the sense that unsintered powder surrounds and supports the part being printed at all times. Other technologies, like FDM, must make use of support structures, which are layered at the same time as the manufactured part. As I mentioned in another post on pricing 3D-prints, calculating accurate 3D-print quotes is very important, especially for small companies that cannot average out pricing errors over large numbers of orders. Depending on the printer and technology used, the support material use can notably affect the price of a print. At Fabnami, we identified 5 main ways to compute the support material volume (and more will come) and developed proprietary algorithms to quickly estimate the support-material volume under a variety of circumstances and price it accurately. Simple ?shadow? support material. This is the most straightforward way to compute the support material. Intuitively, it corresponds to all the volume not directly illuminated by a light source placed above the object and projecting parallel light rays over the part. Fabnami?s algorithms, which are designed with online use in mind, allow to tradeoff speed and accuracy to provide a consistently good user experience. Minimal ?shadow? support material. If the support-material cost is not negligible, the 3D-mesh rotation within the printer bed can be optimized to minimize the support-material volume. Fabnami?s engine uses a proprietary heuristics to sample the fitness landscape and rapidly locate the minimum. The optimally-oriented 3D-mesh is made available to the 3D-printing bureaus to be fed to the slicing / toolpath generation software. ?Flat-part? support material. Often, it is the machine-time that drives the manufacturing costs. For some printers, the machine-time is directly proportional to the height of the part within the print bed. Fabnami?s pricing engine can be configured to lay the 3D-mesh flat, so that its minimal bounding-box dimension is oriented vertically, and to compute the support material under these conditions. The support material volume is not necessarily minimal, but the savings in machine-time usually compensate for that. Embedding support material. Some printers, for example the ProJet 3500 HDMax, embed almost completely the part in support material. In this case, one can compute the support-material volume by simply subtracting the part volume from its bounding-box volume and optionally multiplying the result by a factor lower than 1 to account for the fact that the bounding-box is not completely full and for the density of the support-material. Optimal support material. When the cost-component of the support material is relatively high, its use must be optimized. Simply minimizing its volume might compromise the stability of the part during the manufacturing process, but excessive use would negatively affect print prices. Stratasys pioneered the generation of optimal support-material geometries with its trademarked SMART method, which generates support-material geometries that minimize cost without negatively affecting stability. We independently developed algorithms that replicate and improve Stratasys? approach and allow 3D-printing bureaus to accurately quote online 3D-prints done with Stratasys? hardware. Optimal support material for a test spiral (30x30x80 mm) Fabnami?s optimal support material generation might look similar to strategies used in buildings: support structures can become thinner or grow in cross-section depending on the size of the supported surfaces. Also, for the same reason that makes the robustness to bending of same-sized rods and tubes similar, the support structures are hollowed to reduce costs without reducing the support?s stability. Fabnami?s optimal support-material is not scale-invariant: the same 3D-mesh, re-scaled to different proportions, leads to the generation of different support structures, which are respectively optimal at the different scales. Optimal support material for a test spiral (150x150x375 mm) Fabnami?s engine does not actually generate support-structures, but grows them. Our engineers, led by Dr Claudio Felicioli, developed an advanced method based on Cellular Automata. Small, self-contained ?computational units? are attached on a mesh?s overhanging surfaces. These units are programmed to replicate, spread, widen and shrink according to a set of local rules, literally growing the support-material as a sort of ?synthetic biology? creature. This approach resulted in a very fast and robust algorithm, which is, by chance, also pretty cool to write about. ShareShare 5 ways to generate (and grow) support material </p>

<p>In his book ?The Price of Everything?, Eduardo Porter writes that ?Everything has a price, but it isn't always obvious what that price is?. That is true also for 3D-printed objects. Until a few years ago, rapid prototyping services were always accompanied by the consultancy of an expert and quotes would implicitly include that into the price for a 3D-print. Companies like Shapeways and Sculpteo are making us accustomed to highly standardized web-based 3D-print services for which human interaction is minimized to offer competitive prices. Figuring out the right price formula is not an easy task and even Shapeways tweaked its price models a couple of times since it started operating. 3D-print prices can be chosen to depend on a number of variables: amount of print material, amount of support material, machine space and machine time being the most common ones. Accurately quoting prints for some printers, like, for example, the ProJet 660, can involve the estimation of the binder, dye and infiltrant use on top of machine time and print material. For some technologies, like SLS, the support material does not noticeably affect the print costs whereas for others, namely FDM, the support material represents a non-negligible cost component. Quoting 3D-prints offline is slow but straightforward. The software bundled with the printers can estimate material use and print time, which can then be inputted into a spreadsheet to compute the print quote. Most 3D printing bureaus still work this way, but the global success of e-commerce clearly shows that web-based online pricing is what consumers prefer. Slicing or toolpath generation is often too slow to be used to generate quotes online, where waiting times should be as short as possible. For this reason, at Fabnami we develop fast and accurate algorithms that compute material use and machine time based solely on the geometrical and topological features of 3D-meshes, without the need to use slicing software. The most challenging class of algorithms we developed is closely related to the computation of the support material. The volume of the support material heavily depends on the orientation of the model within the printer bed. Also, some companies developed enhanced methods to generate the support material and reduce print costs, like the trademarked Stratasys SMART support, which, according to Stratasys? press release ?works similar to classic arch design in architecture, in which columns support layers of bricks that get progressively wider, so that the narrow columns can support a structure much wider and heavier at the top?. Since its first release, Fabnami offers the possibility to compute the ?shadow? support material volume and, optionally, to minimize its volume by optimally rotating in real-time the 3D-meshes. In this way, Fabnami computes accurate online quotes without having to resort to approximations. Since mid-February 2015 Fabnami also offers the possibility to estimate the use of the support material generated by Stratasys? SMART methods, which opens up the possibility for Stratasys? printers owners to offer their services online. Is so much accuracy really necessary? Companies like 3DHubs presently price prints by print-material volume only and they have been so far successful. The need for accuracy depends on the business volume and so on the number of prints. Large 3D-printing bureaus can quote prints based on approximate estimations, because errors are averaged-out. Small companies instead do not enjoy the possibility to rely on large-number statistics and need accurate pricing for single prints, not only on average. That?s why we devoted so much time and resources to the design and development of proprietary algorithms, based on which our servers quote thousands of 3D-prints each month.</p>