Seven days ago, the additive manufacturing (AM) manager of a large aerospace player was walking these floors, sipping this coffee, and looking at this set-up.
They were in the neighbourhood on business and wanted to see some additive manufacturing innovation before the flight back to the US.
“Do you have anything exciting and innovative to show me?” the email in 3T AM CEO Dan Johns’ inbox read.
“Not really,” came his reply.
“Oh… that’s interesting.”
The response was not meant to be rude, nor was it even meant to be modest. That there’s nothing particularly interesting about this facility is, in fact, a point of pride. Having worked for both GKN Aerospace and Airbus, Johns has seen how manufacturing plants tick. And so, what has been built since he came into the business upon BEAMIT’s takeover of 3T AM is nothing to write home about. But because of that, it is.
Tours of 3T AM’s factory begin at the end. For good reason. The first is because the hundreds of cylindrical end-use parts that are being ferried around the facility via trolley are the whole point of a factory like this. It’s not about the printing, it’s about the parts. Another is because this is where most of the 3T AM team lives. And Johns likes 3T’s guests to get acquainted as much with the team as the machinery.
Before a tour gets fully underway, however, Johns will make use of the coffee machine. This was the very first capital expenditure signed off when BEAMIT made its acquisition of 3T – the theory being that you can’t risk stocking bad coffee with Italian owners. It’s also an excuse to go via the commercial team’s office where Johns likes to provide a bit of context to what his guests are about to see.
Here, two of 3T’s Strategic Account Managers, Matt Wennington and Sarah Powell, reveal the average order price has increased tenfold and their order ‘win ratio’ is up from 8% to 72% in the three years since the new ownership came into the business. The company’s highest order in that time – celebrated, apparently, with a team outing to a steak restaurant – was over 1 million GBP.
“That value has come from these guys building what we call customer intimacy,” Johns says. “It’s very much about engaging with them, understanding the customer’s requirements, the customer’s product, and the customer’s decision-making processes. The customer intimacy is a core part.”
3T AM
The 3T AM conference room is where tours of the factory conclude. While his guests find a seat and the clock ticks towards the end of the day, Johns takes the opportunity to do two things. The first is to deliver a presentation, adding more colour and more context, and the second is to grab Commercial Director Eddie Andrews to contribute – and to make dinner arrangements for tonight.
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Neither live locally to 3T’s base in Berkshire – Andrews is in Bristol, and Johns is even further away in Devon – so this is a frequent occurrence when spending multiple days on-site. Fine dining, it turns out, is a particular interest of Johns’. And not just as a source of sustenance.
Like anyone who drives long distances, Johns can appreciate the transactional, quick turnaround nature of a fast-food joint, but he prefers the kind of restaurant that provides a high level of service, quality, and intimacy; the kind you might even have to book months, maybe a full year, in advance. That’s what he wants 3T to be.
“Our ambition is three-star Michelin restaurant,” Johns says, “That’s a big difference in what we serve, who our customers are, and how long our customers spend with us. Everything to understand about making AM a success is in that analogy: McDonald’s to Michelin restaurant. You’ll never have a kitchen that has got Michelin customers in the front of your restaurant and in that same kitchen is a window at the back with a drive-thru doing burgers. That kitchen operation can’t do that because you’ll never give the right quality of service to either side. You have to choose what you want to be. You can’t be both.”
Derek is another team member to be introduced. Briefly. As Head of Operations, he can usually be spotted rushing, clipboard in hand, across the shop floor. He was brought in to help set the factory up like it should be set up. The EDM and CNC equipment are now neighbours, with the operators, programmers and technicians all door that not even Johns has the keycode for. sitting on the same bank of desks in the heart of the shop floor. 3T’s inspection space also lives next door, having been brought over from the facilities that house the 3D printing systems across the industrial park.
These are some of the customers that remained after a significant consolidation of the number of clients 3T works with.
There are more than half a dozen machining systems here – one of them a Matsuura machine purchased recently to help scale the manufacture of those aforementioned cylindrical components. These parts are down-the-hole oil and gas applications, machined to their end-use shape after being printed on a metal powder bed fusion system down the road. It’s a part that, initially, had no redesign. 3T secured orders on this component, transitioning the production from subtractive to additive, by processing the design the client had been working with for years. When the design was revisited at a later date, the client merely removed one of the two flutes that supported the structure of the part to improve gas flow. 3T is now manufacturing this component at around 1,000 units a year and expects to have ramped up to around 3,000 in the next 18 months.
Elsewhere, parts are being manufactured for the likes of Airbus and the MOD, including one for the latter which is locked away behind a secure
That consolidation of clients has been part of 3T’s transition from a branch of McDonald's to a Michelin-star restaurant, though Johns concedes 3T is merely a ‘two-rosette gastro pub’ at this stage.
To get to where it has got to today, though, has required some brave decisions. By working with fewer customers, 3T has managed to enhance the quality of its services. It is winning more business and bringing in more money per project. In an act of transparency, Johns opens the company’s books to his guests, showing how the annual losses of 1.2 million GBP when the new ownership took over has been turned into profit, with a 2 million GBP swing in profit in less than four years, and 60% YoY growth.
The company has even been prepared to say no. One customer application, for example, was losing the company money when the new ownership came in, so 3T was minded to walk away when the contract came to an end if the client wouldn’t renegotiate the terms.
3T has also stopped doing rapid prototyping jobs and works less now with motorsport users than it ever has done – its sister operation in Italy is used for ‘Fast Make’ projects – though it doesn’t stop the business from thinking like one.
3T AM
As he leads the way through its 3D printing facilities, Johns is keen to place the emphasis on manufacturing rather than additive. The entire structure of the business and its factory layout has been built around that single word. It is what a facility looks like when it treats AM as just another tool in the toolbox.
But a guest touring these facilities will not leave Berkshire thinking that the people here aren’t passionate about AM. They love it.
At the window of an EOS M290, Johns will encourage his visitors to take a peek inside. He knows they know what a printer laying down powder looks like, but there’s something different about the spectacle inside this machine. And it’s that, in the corner of the chamber, you can see the build plate. The print is halfway done, but there’s no powder being laid down in the corner to the left-hand side. The machine has been short-fed, deliberately, because there’s no part there, ‘so why lay down powder in that area of the plate?’
“Powder that goes into overflow is cost and it’s a quality concern,” Johns explains. “Every little part of this business is about continuous improvement. When people say you can’t compete with AM, you can, but you’ve got to make tiny, marginal gains in absolutely everything. It’s the same philosophy as a Formula 1 team. We’ve made the dramatic changes at the beginning. Now, it’s incremental, 1% gains, every single day.”
3T’s engineers are KPI-managed to reduce the usage and waste of material, which has helped bring down the cost of implementing additive. And it’s a good job because the company’s dozen or so EOS M 290s and three M 400-4s are booked up for the rest of the year, so the company is going to be getting through a lot.
If the printers are busy, so too are the machining systems. 3T doesn’t have a single customer job where parts are shipped without machining. And that has shaped the way the company thinks about AM.
Per 3T’s philosophy, it is the machining centre that makes the parts. The AM factory down the road? That merely makes the material.
Johns makes the point throughout his tours. It is mentioned before the guest is even offered a cup of coffee, it comes up again when walking the machining factory floor, and once more as he delivers his presentation. From his experience, 3D printing machine manufacturers aren’t always on board with the idea that their machines are used much earlier in the value chain, but 3T and its customers are apparently on the same wavelength.
As he returns to the point at the end of the day, a second cup of coffee now in hand, Johns flashes a presentation slide across the screen. It depicts the typical supply chain for metal products, from the end part all the way back to the ore extraction point. He notes how once metal is mined, it is put through heat processes, then shipped to have manufacturing and machining processes applied to it, then shipped to be put into a sub-assembly, and then shipped again to be put into a product for use.
“But if we consider AM prints the material billet, we’ve shrunk a foundry into a box and that box produces the billet,” he explains.
This thought process started to develop sometime ago. In the early 2010s, while working at Airbus, Johns commissioned an environmental engineer to conduct a lifecycle mapping study of AM versus a traditional machining process. The study found that by doing things the conventional way, to manufacture a 1kg part, 10kg of billet would be machined away and 26 tons of rock would need to be mined. Using additive without a redesign would only require 9 tons of rock to be mined with 1.2 kilos of ‘billet’ being used.
3T AM
It is this approach that Johns is interested in sharing with the wider additive manufacturing community. To glance at the AM industry, you would see some success and some frustration, some who have identified suitable applications and others struggling to make a business case for the technology. But in 3T, there is a company making the technology work across a myriad of applications. Johns puts it down to the decision not to position AM as the leading part of the company’s value chain.
“The cost of the machines are too expensive,” he says, “but people saying [this part] is too expensive is because, I bet, they are not comparing apples for apples. They’re looking at that [part] and saying if I CNC machine it, I’m just going to look at the cost of CNC machining time at 40 pounds an hour [for example] versus the AM print time at 40 pounds an hour. And then they go, ‘It’s too expensive.’ They need to consider the cost of producing the material, as well as the CNC machining, because you compare it on what your cost of billet is not your cost of machining. Comparing CNC machining and AM is not apples for apples. Our philosophy is that AM prints a billet and then you make parts. So, if you want to compare AM, compare it to the cost of the billet.”
Back in 3T’s conference room, Johns and Andrews are now stressing the importance of focus. In the last three years, the company has focused on low-mix, higher volume applications, it has honed in on manufacturing rather than design, and it has moved away from the common pitfall of trying to offer every service to a client from inception to finished part.
It's at this moment, the squelch of marker pen on whiteboard brings a halt to the conversation.
A conversation that has been establishing the 3T AM way of thinking. That you need to build your business on your core competencies and your core competencies alone. That you perhaps need to think differently about AM’s place in the manufacturing value chain. And that you can’t adequately serve series production applications and quick prototyping jobs with the same operation.
With that, it’s time for coffees to be sunk, for bags to be packed, and for Johns to find a restaurant he can take some inspiration from.
As the lights are switched off and door is closed, four words are left alone on the whiteboard.
“Don’t go chasing rainbows.”
Dan Johns will present his keynote presentation, 'Making the Shift to AM Production to Create High-Value Growth with a Net-Zero Focus', at TCT 3Sixty on Thursday June 6th, 2024 - 10:30-11:00am. Register at TCT3Sixty.com.
