The last time TCT Magazine was on the ground at RAPID + TCT, we were in a pre-pandemic world. Overseas travel was routine, as was bumping into John Dulchinos [JD] at an additive manufacturing trade show.
Then, he was the VP of Digital Manufacturing at Jabil, one of the largest contract manufacturers in the world. Jabil's adoption and application of additive manufacturing is well documented, and Dulchinos had much to do with the company's strategic direction with that suite of technologies.
In 2021, he left his role at Jabil after several years, with his next career move still up in the air. He could try something new, return to the industry he started in, or remain in AM. After much thought, it was an offer from GKN to become the President of the company's Additive division that won out. In March, he assumed his new position and two months later he was back in Detroit talking to TCT.
The last time we sat down to do one of these, you were with Jabil and now you’re here with GKN Additive, so can you tell us what attracted you to this role?
JD: I didn't leave Jabil with the expectation to be here. I was actually thinking of going back into robotics, because that's a hot market these days. But the GKN folks approached me and the more I thought about it, it just seemed like a really interesting thing. And if you think about it, Jabil and GKN, they're similar pedigrees, they're world class manufacturing companies who have been around for a while and that being around for a while has meant that they've been really agile in terms of changing their business over time, and serving the market.
The big difference between the two and the thing we always struggled with in my capacity at Jabil is that, at its core, Jabil is a system provider, and the component side of the business really is not strategic to the future of the business. Jabil would be perfectly happy in their business model to just supply chain out all the components – Jabil is a world class supply chain organisation. Compare that to GKN, GKN is a component company. The GKN powder metals, which is what we're part of, it starts with metal powder. and they sell it for 25% of the business and the other 75% is they make metal parts, whether it's little metal parts, or bigger metal parts or larger metal parts, at millions and millions of units a day.
So, when I really looked at the opportunity at GKN, the difference between Jabil and GKN relative to 3D printing is that 3D printing is integral to the future state of GKN. You could argue at some long term future state that 3D printing replaces a lot of what they do today with other manufacturing methods, so it’s kind of critical to their future. This seemed like a really good opportunity to build out a legitimate 3D printing business that was core to a larger manufacturing company. That was really the rationale behind it.
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Exhibit at the UK's definitive and most influential 3D printing and additive manufacturing event, TCT 3Sixty.
You mentioned at the top there that you were thinking about going back into the robotics sector, but what made you stay in AM in the end?
JD: Well, I like AM. My hesitancy with AM is I think we’re just still early. I started my career in robotics and this feels like where robotics was 15, 20 years ago. Now, I think the time horizon will compress, but robotics has gotten to a point, especially over the last five years, where the technology has matured and then there are some really strong market drivers around the labour shortages and labour costs and applications that are intersecting with performance improvements and cost improvements in the technology where it seems like you’re starting to swim downstream.
Here, we’re still living on niche applications, at the edge of the bell curve. So, we still have a ways to go before this really makes that transition into enterprise level solutions that can scale. But I think the promise is still there and this is an interesting business to manage. There’s a blending of two things: we have a corporate investment that GKN’s been making for the last seven or eight years around building a metals 3D printing business – we have a really good relationship with HP around industrialising binder jetting – and then we have the Forecast 3D side which is a pure prototyping business; small parts, large order flow, fairly high agility, things are happening every hour of the day. And I think the future state of 3D printing is a combination of the two and so the opportunity to blend these two into a real digital manufacturing solution was intriguing to me.
GKN Additive
GM spoiler closeout seal printed with the HP Multi Jet Fusion technology.
Can you elaborate on that and tell me about you remit as GKN Additive President?
JD: The first thing is blend these two cultures and activities into a common, unified strategy around digital manufacturing. And that has to go across the product lifecycle, because I think we've got the ability to serve the full product lifecycle, we can do the front end application development and quick turn prototyping and qualification parts with the Carlsbad team, but then we can then scale it with the GKN team and then take it all the way to the backside, which is aftermarket parts. My remits are really to blend the two organisations, to build a legitimate digital manufacturing business that's agile but also can deliver parts at scale to quality standards, and then move the company from being in the parts business to being in the solutions business.
At the keynote [on day 1 of RAPID + TCT 2022], we talked about this application for GM [a spoiler closeout seal, of which 60,000 units were additively manufactured in five weeks]. This is the seal and that’s the spoiler, and that seal improved the aerodynamics and improved the gas mileage so these cars could meet CAFÉ (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) requirements. What I like to say is that the printer companies like to talk about this, which is the part that comes out of the printer, but customers are buying this in that. And we need to be in the this and that business, not in the parts printing business.
So, we want to move our company and our customer engagement team from being parts people to being solutions people and ultimately to being market and application focused because if you're going to be in the solutions business for automotive, you've got to understand their quality standards, you've got to understand their operational processes, how do you qualify things and that doesn't come with a general purpose team, it comes with people who are focused on markets and applications and solutions.
Syng Cell Alpha, the worlds first Triphonic speaker
You reached 60,000 units of that application with AM, tell me about some of the other volume applications GKN is working on.
JD: This is the speaker from Syng – these are the ex-Apple guys who are going to reinvent high-end acoustics. We’ve delivered 10,000 of them and this is through their Series A, so they’re about to raise the money to scale. This should go to the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of units at some future state – real production. And then on the metal side, we’re qualifying applications for a number of customers on the HP technology that will scale into tens of thousands of units as well. 3D printing is at that ten to low hundreds of thousands [level of volume]. I think is where the industry will make sense for the foreseeable future, barring some technological breakthrough. It's not going to look like GKN's traditional business, which is making millions of parts for customers.
What are the big opportunities you see for additive manufacturing?
JD: If I was going to walk out tomorrow and go look for opportunities, they would be prototyping, healthcare devices and aerospace parts. All three of those are all existing markets today because those customers will pay a substantial premium for parts. Aerospace can justify parts on fuel savings in a plane, medical can justify it on better outcomes and prototype can justify it on speed. That’s the market today. For the future, I think the next big opportunity is going to be sitting around automotive. There’s also an existing market today around performance automotive, but that’s really small. I think this is going to become more of a mainstream technology in automotive, especially around the product development phase that goes well beyond prototyping. The whole move to EVs [will bring] a new set of lower volume cars that will start to make sense for 3D printing and I think with binder jetting we’re going to get to the next step in cost reductions that allows us to start to see metal AM parts go into certain lower volume cars.
And what would you say are the biggest challenges that still remain for AM?
JD: The industry still thinks about making a part that comes out of the printer and manufacturing companies are looking for enterprise level solutions to put into manufacturing. The [AM] industry is trying to deliver technology and parts, and customers are trying to buy outcomes and solutions. And so, I think the biggest gap is we’re still thinking not at a solutions level as an industry. That’s one element. The second big gape is ultimately the value. We’re basically trying to take a 3D printer and replace an injection moulded part, or a machined part or a cast part, and that's just a losing game because the only way 3D printing really delivers the ultimate value is for system level designs.
This [Syng] speaker was created because the engineers started with, ‘what’s the optimal flow and geometry to create the best acoustical sound in 360 degrees?’ and then work backwards and said, ‘well the geometry needs to look like this. With some slight changes, we can make this in a 3D printer.’ But if they’d started traditionally, they would have said, ‘we need three speaker cones,’ we would stack them up, glue them together or bridge them together, and then we’re end up with a non optimal solution that would compromise the performance of the part. There's lots of that out there but our world has been trained to think like this. So, a seal designer at GM was designing this instead of thinking about how could I optimise this spoiler with the perfect geometry and then come back and look for manufacturing solutions? Not thinking about it at that level makes it really difficult for the industry to move forward, because we then get pushed into the parts business and in the parts business, we're not going to be a like-for-like, better-cost solution than an injection moulded part.
So, thinking solutions and outcomes rather than parts and starting at a systemic level design are the two areas where I think the industry is stuck. And it’s not just the industry, it includes our customers too to start thinking that way.
