Protolabs has expanded its offering to enable 'full-service production capabilities,' helping to serve companies from pre-production through to large-scale manufacturing and end-of-life product support.
The company says it will bring improved pricing options for larger part orders, enhanced quality control, and industry-focused certifications. Protolabs will also maintain its low-volume and quick-turn prototyping offering.
In line with this expansion of capabilities, Protolabs is now providing users with the ability to connect directly with its production experts for complete program management on projects, supplementing its existing instant quoting service. This new offering will include assistance with the quoting platform and file uploads to help navigate orders with complex bills of materials and strategic sourcing from both Protolabs and its network partners. The company says operations specialists can assist with logistics fulfilment and applications engineers can work with customers to optimise CAD models and reduce overall costs.
To align with the expansion, the entire customer experience at Protolabs is also evolving. In addition to immediate online access to instant quoting, customers now have the option to connect directly with a team of production experts for complete program management on projects. That includes assistance with the quoting platform and file uploads to help navigate orders with complex bill of materials (BoM) and strategic sourcing from both Protolabs and its network partners. Operations specialists can assist with logistics fulfilment and applications engineers can work with customers to optimise CAD models and reduce overall costs.
“It’s a deeper partnership with our customers—product developers, engineers, buyers, procurement teams—to ensure full production support from start to finish,” said Protolabs’ President and CEO, Rob Bodor. “We are now truly a single manufacturing resource for companies around the world. Our regional organisations are now entirely focused on ensuring the best possible customer engagement and experience, and we have a global operations organisation with the sole responsibility of seamlessly fulfilling customer part orders as a single unified offering.”
Protolabs offering will now comprise high-volume manufacturing with lower piece-part pricing; high-requirement moulding; advanced polymers and metal 3D printing; and verification and validation processes to better serve quality assurance and certification needs of industries like medical and aerospace.
Protolabs Strategic Growth Officer Luca Mazzei added: “Rapid prototyping driven by automation and technology-enabled processes will always be at the core of who Protolabs is as a company. But as the market has changed, Protolabs is also changing to better meet the evolving needs of our customers. That is what our expansion into full-service production represents—a much more comprehensive way to serve our customers from start to finish.
“The marriage of speed and automation to quality control, cost efficiency, and advanced manufacturing is a union unseen in the manufacturing industry until now. Our customers have asked for these combined benefits for years, so we’re excited that we are able to bring this to them from prototyping to production—and every step along the way.”
Last year, Protolabs announced it had shut down its DMLS 3D printing services at its Putzbrunn site, but also revealed several expansions to its 3D printing offering, including an Axtra3D Lumia X1 3D printing system, two HP Jet Fusion 5600 3D printers, and two new PAx Natural materials for its SLS capabilities.
