Back in May, I penned a bit of a rant in the article titled “Word of the Day”. The crux of that story was that players in AM have liberally adopted the term “industrial” to describe their printers. It is now so commonplace that industrial has become a meaningless adjective used for printers of all levels.
The moral of that article was that each reader needs to decide for themselves what constitutes industrial-grade and then investigate to see if a printer measures up. Well, I am now living through this dilemma of defining industrial. After hours of deliberation and contemplation, I have not arrived at a suitable definition.
The reason I am now enveloped by this quandary is that I am involved with the Additive Manufacturing Users Group (AMUG). Every year, AMUG hosts a conference for additive manufacturing (AM) users. Conference attendance is limited to those that rely on AM, in their work lives, to get the job done and that are seeking input on both basic and advanced concepts. For years it has simply stated that to attend individuals must be affiliated with AM ownership or operation for commercial or industrial purposes. In the age of clear distinctions between consumer-grade and professional-grade printers, that statement worked. Today, it doesn’t.
AMUG provides a venue where users share insights and experiences that help them get more out of, and do more with, AM. While a casual user would certainly benefit from the conversations, he/she would likely contribute very little back to the community in terms of deep, meaningful information. AMUG is pondering the question “What is industrial?” so that it may be applied to interested attendees, sponsors and exhibitors. At the AMUG Conference, it is about quality of insightful conversations, not the quantity.
While AMUG has a clear understanding of the demographic that it serves, it now faces the very same challenge I cited in the May article. As a member of AMUG’s Board, I am a part of a team trying to come up with answers; answers that have proven difficult to find. See for yourself; look up the definition of industrial and you will be presented a nebulous description that basically says, “used in industry”.
The original fallback position, price point, is no longer a clear, distinct measure. The common threshold used in AM analysis is $5,000 (£3,900). However, users convincingly prove that printers below that threshold can measure up when deployed by the dozens for a company’s engineering and manufacturing teams’ usage. At the same time, a comparably priced printer may sit idle for long stretches and then be used to make a few basic fixtures.
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Applications don’t work as a determining factor either. Prototyping is as valid as series production and surgical training aids are just as worthy of an industrial label as assembly fixtures.
For other industries, such as power tools and office machines, an industrial label suggests high productivity, long duty cycles and extended service life. This would be an interesting and workable approach. However, the variety of technologies yields varying throughputs and vendors don’t publish expected duty cycles or service lives. In the future, we may be able to rely on OEE (overall equipment effectiveness), which incorporates throughput, scrap, uptime and usage, but this isn’t widely used or commonly published.
So, what else is there that can be used to award an industrial label to an AM solution? Maybe you have the answer. Imagine that you will be at the AMUG Conference seeking deep, insightful conversations that help you and your company advance AM. Now ponder what kind of people you can get that information from, both on the attendee side and exhibitor side. What are the characteristics of the AM solutions they use or sell that would form a clear, unquestionable foundation that answers the question, “What is industrial-grade?” If you have any thoughts on this, please comment.
