ARBURG GmbH + Co KG
Additive manufacturing may still be ten years away from reaching the ‘plateau of productivity’ (Gartner Hype Cycle, 1995) according to ARBURGadditive Managing Director Victor Roman.
Roman was talking on this week’s Additive Insight podcast, where he also weighed up the pros and cons of additive manufacturing against injection moulding. Arburg itself is most renowned as an injection moulding company through its development and delivery of hardware equipment, but moved into the 3D printing space more than ten years ago – when most would agree 3D printing was entering the ‘peak of inflated expectations.’
In that time, Arburg has not only had to manage the hype around 3D printing but also had to contend with a hesitancy of manufacturers to make significant changes to their manufacturing processes. Roman says that there are generally two types of customer that ARBURGadditive speaks with – those who have embraced additive manufacturing and built up a competency, and those that have continued to do things the way they’ve always done them.
“On the one side, you have customers who are working for years with additive manufacturing, so they build up the competencies that you need, they are thinking additive and they have the expertise. And this customer says, ‘It’s magnificent because I have some small quantity or individualised products and we are much cheaper and the quality is good enough.' We are speaking with them, ‘What do you need?’ ‘More quality, efficiency, the process has to be cheaper.’ We are discussing with them, but they are thinking additive.
“Then on the other side, we have customers that didn’t start this way. They are thinking very traditional. ‘We are doing this because we did this the last 60 years or 70 years.’ They are interested, because they are engineers, but they are comparing the quality of additive manufactured parts with injection moulded parts. But if you are doing this, you have to think that the design is created for injection moulding and not for additive.”
He goes on to emphasise the importance of part volumes, for example, when considering which manufacturing process to leverage, and also points out that the adoption of a company thinking more traditionally about part production will take time.
It brings us to additive manufacturing’s place on the Gartner Hype Cycle. The plateau of productivity is defined as the point at which ‘mainstream adoption starts to take off.’ That is to say there is broad applicability of the technology across markets and industry is beginning to implement the tech into their workflows.
But because the earlier adopters of the technology are still requesting the likes of Arburg for greater efficiency, better quality and lower costs, that broad adoption hasn’t yet arrived. Roman anticipates it’s still at least a decade away.
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“The cycles between hype and the trough of disillusionment, there are ten years and you need also ten years, depending on the technology, to get into the plateau of productivity,” Roman said. “We learned a lot over the last ten years and see it in our customers. They have changed their buying behaviour. In the last ten years, a lot of customers bought a printer to show their technology competitiveness. This changed after the [Covid-19] pandemic. Before corona, we spoke about the price of our Freeformer. Now, we are speaking about ‘we have this business case and what are the costs?’ From my experience, this is a very, very clear signal that the market is becoming much more serious.”
