HP on HP: How the internal use of 3D printing is shaking up one of the world's biggest plastic supply chains

“This is a company of engineers and they like doing creative things. When they knew we were smiling and supportive, they would go do it on their own.”

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When HP physically introduced its first additive manufacturing platforms two and a half years ago, the 3D printing business’ figureheads suggested it offered competitive print times and impressive cost-per-part, and that it had the power to change corporate or institutional behaviour and disrupt manufacturing.

On one hand, you had claims anyone with only a smidgen of marketing tact would make when unveiling a new piece of technology, and on the other, some more bold, profound assertions.

It’s easier said than it is done to completely change how designers and manufacturers operate, how they want to operate. The purpose of HP’s Multi Jet Fusion (MJF) technology was to hand manufacturers a new tool. One they could use to manufacture in volume. One that could negotiate complex geometries and an array of different designs at a time. One that could change the way they do things.

HP, itself the type of manufacturer it was targeting with this launch, was beginning to build its first MJF platforms as the 3D printing division was showcasing the technology across a series of trade shows and internally organised events. So, Stu Pann, the company’s Head of Supply Chain, said, ‘Hey, go and see how many of those parts inside the 3D printer make sense to be 3D printed,’ because a lot of time was being used up on tooling through conventional means. Pann’s own prediction was that maybe three or four of the parts would be economically viable for 3D printing.

“I was trying to be imaginative and I wasn’t even close,” he laughed. “As they went through the design, and by the time they were done with the analysis, and this is just our first stab at it, we found 60 of roughly 112 plastic parts that we needed inside that printer to move powder around could, and should, be printed by a 3D printer given the economics.”

It kickstarted an internal initiative called ‘Reinventing HP with Multi Jet Fusion’ (or ‘HP on HP’ for short), a play on the company’s ‘Reinventing Manufacturing’ drive since the introduction of MJF. HP went deep on this initial product – the application of MJF on MJF was displayed at RAPID + TCT 2018, with the number of 3D printed parts in the 300/ 500 full-colour series now up to around 140 – and then they went broad, implementing the technology across the wider HP business and supply chain.

“We want to see this migrated into customer environments, but there’s no better place to start than home, and we have one of the biggest plastic supply chains in the world,” Scott Schiller, HP’s Global Head of Customer and Market Development, told TCT at Formnext 2018.

Inspiration was leveraged from parts like the MJF air duct which was redesigned from seven assembled components to one, reducing cost by 30% and avoiding $190k in capital expense. HP’s Indigo division redesigned more than 21 parts for the Indigo 12000 Digital Press printer, with 80% cost reduction and 91% assembly reduction. So far, 30% of Indigo engineers have undergone Design for Additive Manufacturing (DFAM) training.

Then there’s one of Schiller’s favourite applications on the HP Latex Printer side: a machined block of aluminium that’s function is to just hold a sensor in place inside the large, industrial printing systems HP offers. It was typically machined in aluminium because these printers sell in the thousands rather than millions, like the company’s smaller, consumer-targeted printers. Having seen the gains they could get with some basic CAD work, HP’s design engineers decided to throw generative design at the aluminium block. Weight came down by 93% (355g to 23g), carbon footprint reduced by 95%, and cost was halved.

“Let the computers do what they do best and really get into some wild algorithms, and you end up with this very organic-looking structure which is kind of the limit. It does exactly what it’s supposed to do, nothing more, but what you see is you’ve got an order of magnitude reduction in weight and then two orders of magnitude reduction in carbon footprint, and it costs half as much,” Schiller explained. “Talk to executives about those kind of numbers and you get attention really fast, and if this is just this one little part, how many of these little parts are there? That’s how this started, these kind of observations.”

First, the HP on HP program penetrated the products HP delivers to market, and then it started to impact the way HP makes them. Pann estimates around 30% of what HP on HP outputs is now tools, jigs, fixtures, guides and grippers. One application is a drill extraction shoe used in the process of producing print heads, to get rid of excess material. This tool is another that is made with machined aluminium, and typically weighs 575g, costs $450, and takes three to five days to produce. With Multi Jet Fusion, HP has manufactured it in PA12, reduced its weight by 90% to 52g, got the cost down to $18, and can have the tool ready within a day or two.

Applying MJF to tooling components was also a big help when HP decided to bring out a larger version of its Sprocket product. That would typically mean needing a separate SKU and production line. But HP’s design engineers got to work and made it so the tooling could change on the production line, meaning they could now move back and forth between the tooling components for the smaller and larger Sprocket products in much less time. Cost came down 90%, and average lead time was down from 13 weeks to two.

“The obvious becomes possible because you have a way to action it,” Pann articulated. “When you think about how you get stuff down the conveyor belt and how you grip it, you can generate grippers and size, any shape, for a robot hand to pick something up. If you think about the old way of doing it, we have to go to a robotics company, order a special arm, get it fit, sometimes it would take two or three weeks because it wasn’t in stock. Now we can just do it.”

And so they have. HP on HP is touching all stages along the product lifecycle, from prototyping through bridge production through full production through spare parts and inventory. From ‘building the plane as it was flying’ with the MJF 4200 to end-use components in large format printers and the tooling that facilitates the manufacture of these products. Every second, HP ships 1 printer and 1.7 PCs. Every year, it delivers 100 million products to 170 countries around the world. It’s a $50 billion business, and so a programme like this requires a lot of teamwork, and teamwork across departments as well as within them. It was the supply chain that initiated HP on HP, and it’s the supply chain’s mandate that every 3D printed part have a business case, that the design and manufacturing engineers adhere to. But that’s all that was required: support and a single rule.

“All we did as senior leaders was encourage the dialogue and encourage the experimentation. And that was enough,” Pann said. “This is a company of engineers and they like doing creative things so [when] they knew that we were smiling and supportive, they would go do it on their own.”

On the floor, the design engineers are keen to use this technology to reimagine how parts function, to innovate, and their colleagues on the manufacturing side are keen to optimise for cost reasons. A successful collaboration here can mean financial benefits for the business, positive ones for society too, and that’s when attitudes begin to change.

“Historically where it was ‘I’m done with the design, I’ll throw it over the wall and then somebody’s going to optimise it but I’m done with it,’ now it’s much more of an integrative process,” said Schiller. “That’s going to permeate through adoption of this technology. The other thing that’s important is that management understands the potential, and is insistent on realising that potential, because what it ultimately comes down to is organisational behaviour change and something I’m fond of saying is our value proposition has to be so powerful it’s capable of changing a corporate behaviour.”

The toughest challenge HP finds facing its 3D printing business, and additive manufacturing as a whole really, is changing that behaviour and breaking a perceived ‘corporate inertia’. And in a sense, it has had to be willing to change the way it thinks and change the way it makes, itself, and do so in a manner that is economically efficient. The best way to do so, HP thinks, is shoulder to shoulder in a crawl, walk, run framework, embracing technology with a willingness to adapt. Then, what were just bold and profound assertions two and a half years ago, can become bold and profound results.

“It takes a while to break people away from the old way of doing things,” Pann assessed. “This is a totally new approach. You don’t think about cutting a tool, because there is no tool to cut. You don’t think about the limitations of the mould because there are no moulds. You don’t think about design the same way because you don’t have lines to follow, you don’t have cavities to fill. You really have to think differently if you’re going to take full advantage of the technology.”

“Some of these impacts are so profound,” Schiller added. “Once that is demonstrated, creating the top-down mandate is really important to break the corporate inertia, but then that has to be supported from below through the people who actually have to work through this. They need people supporting them, helping them figure out how to move from the way they’ve done things to the way they want to do things.”

“[Breaking] the inertia comes from exposing people to how different this is and the power of the approach,” Pann finished. “It takes time, it takes training, it takes teaching, [to] bridge the way for classic industrial designers to go and say there’s a different way of doing this. Once you get people through that they get really excited because all of these people want to be creative and this is a tool for creativity that didn’t exist before.”

“When I think about the tremendous progress we’ve made in a short amount of time, I’m incredibly optimistic about reinventing our own business with Multi Jet Fusion, as well as what it means for large enterprises around the world transforming theirs," concluded Christoph Schell, President of 3D Printing and Digital Manufacturing, HP. "We challenged our engineers and designers to look at how Multi Jet Fusion could positively impact HP’s business. One year later, we see examples across our business helping realise millions of dollars in benefits: lowering costs, unlocking new design possibilities, reducing time to market, and slashing our C02 footprint.

"We are making strategic decisions to use 3D printing, not because we can, but because we should. It makes economic, product performance, and environmental sense. When you think about the impact of the programme in its earliest days, our use of Multi Jet Fusion illustrates how 3D printing technology does have the power to digitally transform large enterprises.”

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