From the main stage at TCT Show, back in October 2016, I proclaimed that additive manufacturing (AM) had entered an age of innovation. Boy did I underestimate the scope of near-term developments. What we have gained over just the past ten months represents an avalanche of innovation accompanied by a flood of advancement.
Viewed collectively, the pace of change is impressive, amazing and exciting. En masse, the number of new options may lead to overwhelm and bewilderment.
With intermittent intake of daily or weekly news, you may not have realised that the avalanche is barrelling forward. However, it becomes obvious when you aggregate the announcements in time buckets. From August 2016 to January 2017, there were 54 organisations with newsworthy announcements; January to March had 31 organisations; and March to May had 40 organisations. Over just 3 days at the recent RAPID + TCT event, I was exposed to 16 companies that had revealed something new and interesting.
This avalanche count is very conservative. Minor product enhancements and line extensions didn’t qualify nor did the plethora of low-cost, desktop solutions and “me-too” clones. Also, the count does not reflect the number of products that these organisations announced; many had multiple debuts in the past 10 months.
Spanning hardware, software and materials, the avalanche is expanding the available options, which then enlarges the scope of AM applications and opportunities and diminishes the barriers to adoption. Among the recent announcements are lower cost metal AM options (Desktop Metal, Xact Metal, OR Laser and MarkForged); large format metal and plastic printing (Ingersoll Machine Tools, Thermwood and 3D-Hybrid Solutions); automation solutions (Stratasys and PostProcess Technologies); new AM processes (Paxis, Essentium and 3DEO); new materials (Somos, HRL Labs and Covestro); and much, much more.
Curious as to what the avalanche contains? Want the details on all that is available so that you can make strategic and tactical decisions? You won’t get this insight without a bit of effort on your part; there isn’t a shortcut.
If I were to document only the highlights of what is new that I have shared in presentations this year, I would need 16 pages (or more) in this magazine. In those pages, there would only be a high-level description that notes what makes the new offering interesting and a brief explanation of the fundamental process. Beyond that, there would be no other details or commentary. If I had the page space, I still couldn’t comment on each new offering because I am still trying to dig through the mountain of snow to get at the needed insights.
Even if there were a shortcut to amass details on what is new, it would be unwise, unnecessary and foolhardy to attempt absorb all that the avalanche offers. Trying to do so will only serve to fuel a sense of overwhelm, which can lead to frustration and possibly paralysis (by analysis). Additionally, the avalanche won’t be abating in the near term; there isn’t an end in sight. It will continue to grow and race forward. There will be a bit of a lull during the summer months, but the avalanche will return, possibly even larger, when the conference season resumes in the fall.
What you really need is awareness of just the items that are important to your organisation. The goal, therefore, is to identify the handful of snowflakes in the avalanche that can advance your AM usage and expand your AM applications. The approach to do this is to create an on-going methodology of observing the avalanche from a distance with a goal of spotting the opportunities worthy of further investigation.
To do so, be keenly aware of your company’s current challenges and near-term opportunities. Translate these into needs and requirements. Next, review product announcements through the filter of what is required to realise some progress through AM. Do the review quickly with the sole goal of placing each item into a bucket of “not applicable,” “future potential,” or “near-term possibility”. When time allows, then proceed to a more detailed investigation of the snowflakes you have extracted from the daunting wall of frozen precipitation.
Even with this filtering strategy, monitoring the avalanche may be a full-time job so you may want to appoint a Sherpa (see blog post of 23 November 2016) to lead the way through the snowpack and ascend to new heights. Keeping pace with the unabated flow of new opportunities means that this will be a journey, not a race. Along the way, don’t allow others to become numb or <snow> blind to the constant barrage of new offerings.
