As TCT Group Content Manager Sam Davies was working on the latest TCT Deep Dives report - Do industrial additive manufacturing machines cost too much? - former WAAM3D CEO Filomeno Martina said he'd answer some questions, but not all.
What we wanted was for him to break down the cost of an industrial AM system to contextualise a discussion of whether they generally are priced too highly.
For reasons he articulates in this column, he didn't want to do that. But he did have a range of thoughts on the debate between cost and value of industrial AM technology, so we agreed he could write them all down and share those perspectives on the TCT Magazine website.
Here, he considers whether the AM sector is doing well enough to convey the value of its technologies, how AM machines should be priced, and why we need a more useful framework for evaluating industrial AM cost.
In industrial AM, the machine is rarely the right unit of economic analysis. The more relevant unit is the qualified manufacturing outcome that the machine enables.
A machine can look cheap if it removes a critical supply-chain bottleneck, reduces lead time from months to days, avoids tooling, enables a better design, reduces inventory, or makes a part manufacturable that otherwise would not be. Conversely, a machine that is cheap to buy can still be expensive if it is poorly utilised, difficult to qualify, unreliable, unsupported, or disconnected from a real production need.
The difficulty is that the purchase price appears clearly on a quotation, while the value created by the machine is much harder to see because it depends on the application, the customer’s production environment, the maturity of the process, the qualification requirements, the utilisation level, the cost of alternatives, and the strategic importance of time.
Sam Davies
Additionally, AM is not one market or one technology, and therefore not one pricing problem. In a WAAM or DED context, a useful metric may be the cost per kilogram of deposited and qualified material, but even that is incomplete unless it includes deposition efficiency, machining allowance, inspection, shielding gas, consumables, labour, downtime, failed builds, post-processing, qualification and utilisation. In laser powder bed fusion, the relevant metric may be cost per qualified part, where powder handling, nesting efficiency, build time, heat treatment, depowdering, HIP, machining, inspection and yield may all matter more than the purchase price alone. In polymer AM, for example, material cost, finishing labour and part throughput may dominate the economics. But in binder jetting, the economics may depend heavily on furnace loading, sintering distortion and dimensional yield.
Machine price is only one input into the cost of producing an accepted output. This is particularly important in high-value sectors like defence, where delivery of a critical replacement part can keep a vehicle operational. If the alternative is an aircraft grounded, a ship unavailable, a production line stopped, or a critical spare unavailable through the conventional supply chain, then the value of AM is not only in the cost-per-part. It is in readiness, availability, and strategic resilience.
In aerospace or medical applications, the opposite can also be true. The major costs may be qualification, validation, documentation, testing, inspection, process control, and the internal effort required to move from a promising demonstration to repeatable, accepted production.
