The Future of 3D Printing - Ep 2 | The Tech Between Us

Mouser EIT
That’s 3D Printed?
The Tech Between Us – Episode 2 
13 minutes

Raymond Yin 
Welcome back to The Tech Between Us. We're talking with Mark Beatty, Founder & CEO of 3D Agility, on the expansive world of additive manufacturing and the opportunities it brings for engineers. Let's dive back in.

Mark, let's shift gears a little bit and move to the opposite side of the product lifecycle. We've talked a lot about design, but let's go to the opposite side. Repairing or replacing an existing item, our guest on In Between the Tech, Stephanie Brickwede with Deutsche Bahn, uses additive manufacturing to replace broken items on Germany's trains. Are you seeing a lot of requirements with your customers and with other companies to do this at scale?

Mark Beatty 
For sure. And I think the example that you just gave is a great one. So, when you think about industries with really, really long product life cycles. So, rail is one, heavy equipment is one, aerospace is one, defense is one. And you think about the complexity of trying to keep an application up and running, not for a decade, but maybe two decades or three decades, it's really hard for a manufacturer to make the commitment to say, you know what? I'm going to be here for three decades and I'm still going to be able to produce that exact widget or that exact item because when they're going through production, they have enough volume to justify keeping those tools up and running. But at the back end of that, that is something we've had a tremendous amount of success in, is helping with kind of that high mix, low volume things that are going through sunset and basically keep these pieces of equipment alive for another 5, 10, 15 years. So that MRO side, depending on the industry, is a huge opportunity for additive.

Raymond Yin
And that would make sense because once again, you're kind of back to the roots of additive where you're not necessarily building 10 billion of these things, but you're building a hundred brackets or something like that, which is I think really in the sweet spot of the original concept of 3D manufacturing.

Mark Beatty 
Exactly. And the other side of that, Raymond is just the overall capital investment. Instead of - the example that you gave - of fixing an old train that may be essentially paid off, going out and buying a brand new train is very, very expensive. And that goes with a lot of those other examples. So, some of our clients are super interested in saying, you know what? I'd rather make the investment to keep this piece of equipment up and running versus going out and spending a lot more capital to get something net new.

Raymond Yin
I hadn't thought about that point, but yeah, the cost of replacement and fixing versus buying a whole new one. Yeah, interesting! So, from a system standpoint, who would necessarily be responsible for creating … let's say we're using a big piece of equipment and a bracket breaks or something in there needs to be replaced. Would it be the original manufacturer of the equipment that would be responsible for creating a new one of these, or would it be me as the user saying, well, it's broken, I can't use this. Would it be my responsibility to create one of these?

Mark Beatty 
So it really depends. And I think the OEMs do a great job in trying to understand and support a very, very long life cycle. So, let's stay kind of in the industries that we were talking about. The challenges though is that as they release new models and new architectures come online, you're not just trying to get those new models off the ground. Now you have this whole other world of 20 or 30 years also in the background. 

So, I will say there are contracts typically in place and commitments to keep applications going for X amount of years depending on the application. But the opportunity is for companies like us to work with those OEMs to say, okay, as you're beginning to sunset those products, let's be thoughtful of how we transition into obsolescence. Let's be thoughtful of how we kind of walk away from some of those product lines. 

Many times right now, Raymond, is it's just cut a decision made or there is a date achieved and production just stops. And that can be for a myriad of reasons, the original tooling's not good anymore. The high mix, low volume - that side of the portfolio is not profitable anymore. So, there's a whole myriad of decisions on why that happens, but imagine that you could do soft landings into that where, hey, Mr. Customer, we no longer supply that part directly. We have a company like - fill in the blank - to help you mitigate that change. Because imagine you put yourself in that seat as a car owner and you find out that your dashboard is totally shot, and now you can't drive your car because your dashboard's not there anymore, right? That stinks, and I guarantee you would look to the OEM to help you find a solution for that, but you may be outside of that window of opportunity. 

So, I think there's a really interesting and strategic way that companies could start bolting on additive in this aftermarket or MRO world, and it just keeps everybody way happier.

Raymond Yin
Absolutely. Even in our industry, when we get product discontinuance notices, obsolescence notices, and sometimes they're able to say, well, if your customer wants to continue using this, you look at this product. But a lot of times it's like the scenario you're describing, like you said, a kind of a soft landing, okay, well, we will not be making this, but XYZ company might be, and you could probably buy it from them for the next 10 years say, and that to me would make me, as a consumer, would make me much more interested in using a company's products if I knew they had a history of doing something like that.

Mark Beatty
It's brand loyalty and knowing that you got my back and I got yours. And that's what keeps that loyalty sticky. That's what keeps customers coming back. So, in that example, I think let's just put very simple numbers around it. 

Connectivity market, the last time I looked is like 80 billion a year, roughly. And if you look at a typical bell curve of how product is brought to life in production and sunsetted, let's assume a very, very low number, Raymond. Let's say 1% of all connectivity goes through obsolescence a year. That's $800 million a year of product that is disappearing. And that's at 1%. And I'm not saying all that product would be viable to find kind of a second life in the additive world, but what if we paused long enough to be curious to say, okay, what parts of that portfolio would be viable? You're past the worlds of inventory; you're past the worlds of making financial commitments to keep that alive too. That's a whole other benefit.

Raymond Yin 
Right? Absolutely. I understand a lot of the financial decisions are driving a lot of the manufacturing decisions for some of these big companies. And once again, totally get that. And if there's a way through additive partnering with you guys and creating an additive manufacturing solution or landing. I think, once again, that would be probably well worth the financial cost there.

Mark Beatty
We like to think so, and I think we have a lot of use cases that have proved that approach out. I think the other part of this conversation, Raymond, is there's also this middle world where it's not like you have to choose, okay, I'm a traditional manufacturer and I need to make this leap to additive manufacturing. There's all kinds of solutions, the middle that are kind of hybrids where maybe we 3D print the inserts to a mold. Or maybe we do some other creative things that you can still get volume, you can still stay in that traditional format without making a huge leap. And that goes back to my first point of really understanding what the pain point is and what the overall strategy for your portfolio are, and then working backwards to say, okay, what technology makes the most sense?

Raymond Yin
So, Mark, let's say we're going back to the big piece of machinery example. So, I am a user, I'm using this big piece of machinery. A bracket breaks. The OEM unfortunately doesn't have an additive manufacturing landing solution. How do I, as a user of this bracket, go about creating a new part? Would I need to get the original drawings for the OEM or are there other methods to replace this one broken widget?

Mark Beatty
So, there's a couple options and a couple of levers that we deploy. So, in the perfect world, we have the access to the OEM, and we can have this kind of conversation like we're having now to say, hey, let's not just walk away from this customer, walk away from this opportunity. Would you guys be willing to collaborate and coordinate this type of additive strategy? In those cases, we have access to the drawings, we have access to the CADs. What I will say though is if you have a CAD file that was built for a part that was supposed to be rotational molded or injection molding, there still is a leap of making changes to make sure that that part is viable in the additive world. It's not herculean, but there are changes that need to happen in order to make that kind of new production environment real. So that's kind of perfect state. We have access to the OEM, we can get the CADs. That's very easy. 

The more kind of tricky or challenging way of doing it, we've done this plenty of times too, is to get that part that's broken and 3D scan it and totally reverse engineer it. So, in some cases, the part is sold that prints don't exist. CAD files don't exist. So, with the technology and the advances in 3D scanning, we can create models pretty easily and then deploy those technologies to fill that gap.

Raymond Yin
I would guess even with a 3D scan, you would probably need to hire engineers, mechanical engineers, to come in and verify and clean it all up and just get it ready for 3D printing,

Mark Beatty 
So, our guys can do that, right? So, we have a lot of that if it's super tricky or we need x-ray scans to get inside of it. So connectors, in some cases, the geometries or some of the cavities are really, really difficult to make assumptions around. So, you can even deploy kind x-ray scanning to fill in those geometries. But yeah, that's part of it. 

And then the fun part, or the easier part is once you have that CAD file, you can deploy it into 3D printing at a very, very low price point to say, what does this part actually meet our expectation? Does it fill that level of quality that we're looking for where you're not going out and spending 30, 40, $50,000 on a mold, you can do it for a couple hundred dollars.

Raymond Yin
Mark, once again, let's say I'm a user of something that we have just created a 3D model because a piece broke. Are there services and companies for the consumer world that are able to print complex 3D models with complex materials?

Mark Beatty 
Yeah, absolutely. In our world, they're essentially called service bureaus, right? I would say all service bureaus are not created equal. 
It's one of those things that as you vet a new supplier or as you establish new relationships, really prove out they can do what they say they can do. Because we've been in some of those conversations too, Raymond, where a customer has gone through some of those channels and maybe the quality of the product is not what the customer expected. And again, we're all creatures of habit and we don't necessarily love change. So, in some cases, we have customers looking for the excuse not to change. So, when they get just an okay sample back, now their perception is not viable, not going to work for me, move on. So, I would say those services, those companies absolutely do exist. Some are stellar and amazing partners. Others, I'd say there's an opportunity for improvement.

Raymond Yin
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