Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
Sun Tzu was writing about warfare, but he could just as easily have been writing about manufacturing.
Unlike the fail-fast approach popularized by software developers, most manufacturing engineers prefer to build systems that are consistent and reliable. When your cycle times are measured in seconds—or even fractions of a second—it pays to be predictable. Perhaps that’s why manufacturers have been hesitant to treat new processes, like metal 3D printing, as viable for volume production, relegating them instead to prototypes and short runs.
Formulating a manufacturing strategy requires taking as much into account as possible ahead of time and new technologies inherently involve more unknowns than conventional processes. Manufacturing strategies can’t afford to take the Silicon Valley approach, where Murphy’s Law + Iteration = Success.
A good manufacturing strategy must be informed by all of these decisions:
- Capacity: What are you making, what will you use to make it, and how?
- Process: What systems will you employ?
- Facility: What will your factory/organization layout look like?
- Make-or-Buy: What can you do in-house and when will you need to sub-contract?
- Infrastructure: How will you handle planning and control as well as quality assurance?
- Human Resources: What functions and organizational structures do you need?
If we consider each of these decision points as a tactic, Sun Tzu’s aphorism is even more insightful. Just imagine trying to set up a factory without having a broader plan about how it fits into your business. “Noise before defeat” would be an understatement.
By the same token, deploying a manufacturing strategy—in the sense of making a long-range plan to use your manufacturing resources to meet your business objectives—without taking any of these tactics into account would be a slow route to victory indeed, if it ever came at all.
Metal additive manufacturing (AM) illustrates this point with supreme clarity.
Begin with Metal 3D Printing Capacities & Processes
Start your metal additive manufacturing strategy with questions about capacity and you’ll likely find that you already have your answers in mind: whether you’re manufacturing a new product that’s been specifically designed to be 3D printed or redesigning an existing part to take advantage of the technology, you should already know what you’re making.
The questions of what you’ll use to make your product and how you’ll do it are tightly connected to the process question: what systems will you employ? In the case of metal AM, the most popular commercially available processes are: powder bed fusion via selective laser melting (SLM) or electron-beam melting (EBM); direct energy deposition (DED) using metal powder or wire; and binder jetting, which involves depositing a binding agent onto a metal powder bed.
Each of these technologies has its advantages and disadvantages, from the available materials and possible printing speeds to post-processing requirements and, of course, cost. Your selection will depend on your particular application, but the six decisions outlined above are deeply intertwined.
Planning Metal Additive Manufacturing Facilities & Subcontracting
Like pets or children, your first metal 3D printer is a lot more challenging than your second or third. “There are many things that an organization needs to account for with that first machine,” says Gregory Hayes, senior vice president of applied technology for 3D-printing solutions provider EOS North America. “There’s the facility planning, there’s making sure your quality management system is set up to encompass an additional manufacturing procedure, there’s the training and education of your operators and engineers. All of this makes that first machine more difficult than any subsequent machines that go in.”
Exactly how you layout your metal AM systems within your facility will, again, depend on the particularities of your application. However, there is also the broader question of whether you need to start with installing the machines in your own facility in the first place. Hayes, whose Additive Minds team helps new EOS users get started, notes that some EOS customers choose to purchase a system and then install it at an EOS facility to take advantage of the company’s existing infrastructure and knowledge base.
“Their engineers will work together with our engineers on the system, get the application up and running and even qualify the process,” he explains. “Then, when everything is functioning after a few months, they’ll shift that system and all of their engineers back to their location so they hit the ground running. The worst thing for a company is to buy an expensive piece of equipment and not be able to start using it right away.”
The other option for dealing with the metal additive manufacturing learning curve is to subcontract the production of your metal AM parts entirely. However, while this may be the fastest way to get a 3D-printed metal part into your customer’s hands, it doesn’t remove the need for in-house additive manufacturing expertise—unless you’re willing to defer entirely to your supplier. Relying on subcontracting also undermines one of the key benefits of 3D printing as a technology: changing the way you view your logistics by shortening or even eliminating your supply chains.
Filling Out Your Metal Additive Toolbox with Infrastructure & Human Resources
Incorporating metal AM into your planning and control as well as your quality assurance is no small task, but in many ways, it pales in comparison to the training, education and expertise that metal additive manufacturing requires. “The training, education and just getting the additive tool into the engineers’ toolbox is a major hurdle to adoption at the moment,” says Hayes. “I honestly think the most common mistake manufacturers make is not putting enough emphasis on having those trained and dedicated users.”
As the human-machine interfaces (HMIs) for manufacturing have improved, the risk of underestimating the necessary knowledge to run the machines has commensurately increased. Hayes frames this as falling into the trap of thinking that anyone can set up and run a metal AM machine. While that may be true for fixed processes, if you want to stay up to date on the latest developments and explore new applications, you’ll need staff with the right combination of training and experience. “One of the most dangerous things is not knowing what you don’t know,” Hayes observes, “and that’s why one of the hallmarks of a good metal AM strategy is to seek help, because there are many organizations out there.”
A Winning Metal Additive Manufacturing Strategy
Paying close attention to tactics when creating your metal additive manufacturing strategy ensures a faster route to victory but what about the strategy itself? How do you avoid Sun Tzu’s trap of getting so bogged down in minutia that you’re just making noise before defeat?
According to Hayes, you could ask the U.S. Navy. “The Navy understands the challenges of additive and they’ve embraced the journey,” he explains. “They’re thinking about their supply chain, and they’ve gone through the steps of creating centers of excellence, making sure their people get trained and understand the technology. They’ve also viewed additive as a production technology from the start, not just a prototyping technology. And if the U.S. government can do it, then medium enterprise America can, too.”
Ultimately, your metal additive manufacturing strategy needs to be a manufacturing strategy if it’s going to be successful. The data exists to bring this technology into real manufacturing environments. All that’s needed are engineers and manufacturers that are willing to make that leap.