This summer, President Joe Biden announced the AM Forward initiative to improve domestic manufacturing competitiveness and reduce supply chain disruptions by helping small and medium sized manufacturers adopt additive manufacturing (AM, commonly referred to as 3D printing). Citing 90 percent reductions possible in lead times and material costs, the initiative looks to create a national training program, fast track standard and certification development, and provide financing for equipment purchases. Major aerospace OEMs have signed on to the program, signaling that they will purchase 3D printed components from their domestic suppliers to drive demand. Working for an additive manufacturing original equipment manufacturer (OEM), I applaud and support these efforts. Government focus will improve adoption and competitiveness. Concurrently, I believe that the industry can help push itself forward by focusing on its offerings, ensuring that they are reliable and easy to use. Across brands, machines with these two traits, more than any other factor, will drive adoption of additive manufacturing on factory floors.
Additive manufacturing has been on an adoption journey for the past 30 years. In a previous issue, I discussed the four stages of AM. The industry started with rapid prototyping and the universalization of computer aided design (CAD). Then came AM with functional materials and the capability to make end-use parts. Now we have moved into a third phase, AM at scale, and it is not hard to find stories of manufacturers leveraging 3D printing for tens of thousands of parts to overcome supply chain disruptions and keep production lines running. For instance, this summer GM printed 60,000 parts to keep its Tahoe SUV deliveries on time. The final stage is designing for AM, fabricating end-use parts with geometries that cannot be made any other way, using materials designed for the AM process. Moving in this direction, researchers recently reported a new high entropy metal alloy, in the journal Nature, with improved strength and ductility, whose dual-phase nanostructure currently can only be produced with 3D printing. The evolution through the stages is underway—innovators are adopting 3D printing to overcome design constraints, minimize supply chain disruptions, and decrease time to market. Yet, to further accelerate adoption, and bring AM from ten thousand factories into millions of factories, there needs to be a greater focus in the industry on reliability and ease of use – a “just press print” mentality.
Across brands, 3D printers that are reliable and easy to use, more than any other factor, will drive adoption of additive manufacturing on factory floors
Reliability is straightforward for leaders to grasp—in production lines, uptime metrics drive performance. A machine going down on a busy line can cost millions of dollars a day in lost productivity. Although uptime is important for 3D printing, reliability also encompasses getting the part you expect, when you expect it. The print should work the first time, and every time, to a similar precision as expected with manufacturing mainstays such as injection molding, press and sinter, CNC, or casting. Too often 3D printer OEMs aim to deliver the capability to make a part, rather than a reliable and repeatable process that makes the same part wherever it is in the print volume, on whatever printer in your fleet, whenever it was printed. When a manufacturer struggles with an unreliable machine from one OEM, the reputation of the whole industry suffers. What could have been an AM champion becomes a detractor. One approach to achieve reliability is to leverage software and sensor (e.g. cameras, lasers, LIDAR) combo, as Markforged has done with its Blacksmith Adaptive Intelligence platform, to complement—and perhaps even displace—high quality, well-engineered machines. By correcting for machine-to-machine variability, monitoring part quality, and making real-time adjustments, if necessary, the industry can deliver known repeatability.
Easy to use may seem like a nice to have—injection molders and CNCs are not simple, easy to use machines after all. Nevertheless, manufacturing is changing, and the tools must adjust to this reality. The manufacturing workforce is aging, with an average age of 44. 25 percent of the workforce is over 55 years old. Machinists trend even older, by about 10 years on average. Additionally, the number of people in manufacturing roles in the US has decreased 30 percent since 2000, and those in manufacturing stay at a company 5.1 years on average, down 15 percent since 2004. At the same time, that skilled labor is decreasing in number and aging out of the labor pool, the demand on them for fast turnarounds has increased. The rate of introduction of new products, and their importance to the financial health of companies has increased. A McKinsey survey found that more than 25 percent of corporate revenue and profit came from new products with a follow-up survey finding that 50 percent of global revenues in 2026 are expected to come from products and services that did not exist in 2021. In short, the talent pool is not poised to revolutionize the manufacturing floor, but business leaders are expecting versatile factories which can deliver on shorter lead times, to make new products that make up half of the global economy. By focusing on easy to use, rather than infinitely tunable machines, 3D printer manufacturers can turn any labor source into just press print manufactures that make parts at the point of need, and set leaders’ vision up for success.
AM Forward’s improved training, readily available and applicable standards, financing, and industrial partnerships will all increase AM adoption. Yet, to increase access to additive manufacturing and readily scale in every factory, 3D printer OEMs must do their part to provide reliable and simple to use products. Getting this right, as an industry, can make the difference between a slow but steady 50 year adoption cycle and a much faster one that pushes us to think of what we can make next. From my view, “It just works” is my favorite customer response and the feedback I look for to know we are on the right track for this goal.
