Mass production changed the world in the 19th century, driving down prices and allowing a few manufacturers to flood the world with their affordable, identical products. But what if what everybody has is not what you need, yet you need it fast and cheap?
Aerospace and defense companies know this problem all too well. Manufacturing lead times on custom, small-batch orders can measure many weeks, and come with expensive invoices.
Mass production and custom manufacturing may seem at odds, but Sydney, Canada-based Protocase is bringing them together. The company’s mass custom approach merges the quick speed and low cost of mass production with the bespoke and low volume needs of custom design. Protospace, a two-year-old spin-off, brings mass custom to the aerospace and defense industry.
“Even to our aerospace and defense customers, we turn low volume orders around fully custom in two to three days instead of weeks or months,” Steve Lilley, co-founder and president of Protocase and Protospace, told Engineering.com.
How? It’s not easy, but Lilley shared how mass custom techniques can succeed even in the highly regulated aerospace industry. Protospace is a case in point: its customers, Lilley says, include 19 out of the top 20 Tier 1 aerospace companies in the world.
The art of mass customization
Protocase’s journey started in the mid-1990s in the Canadian tradition: in a pub over a glass of beer after a hockey match. Lilley, a mechanical engineer by training, had at that time been working for a small-scale electronics manufacturer, where he had struggled to source small batches of electronics enclosures for the company’s products. His friend Doug Milburn, at that time a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Waterloo, was facing the same problem.
“We couldn’t get a shop to want to take on the work of building two or three enclosures for us,” Lilley said. “And those that would take on the work wanted to charge us an absolute fortune for it and take weeks if not months to do it.”
The two bemoaned their lot, but the conversation quickly moved from problems to the exploration of possible solutions. Was there a way to deliver fully custom parts without the heavy burdens of cost and lead time? They thought there was. The idea was to follow the tenets of mass production—break down products into standardized parts and processes that could be perfected, delivered and repeated quickly and cheaply—while allowing for the unique touches required of custom designs.
Lilley and Milburn were convinced they could pull it off. In 2001, the pair founded Protocase to make custom electronic enclosures and sheet metal or CNC machined parts used for prototyping—and, with its mass custom techniques, to do it in just a few days. The company has now had over 20 years to perfect mass custom, and the key, Lilley says, is automation.
Automating the heck out of everything
Automation in manufacturing is hardly a novel concept, but it’s absolutely essential to mass customization. “We look at every piece of the process, every different stage of production and we determine every repeatable piece that’s in there, and we automate the heck out of it,” said Lilley.
And he means everything. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s a big piece of metal that’s being bent this way or that way. There’s a whole pile of what we call work elements that are exactly the same each and every time. And then what we do is we add what we call the parameters or those custom elements.”
Lilley gives an example of powder coating—a finishing process that uses an electric charge to fuse a dry powder to a metallic surface. The process, Lilley explained, consists of a set of repeatable steps such as spraying the powder on top of a substrate and subsequent baking to fuse and harden it into a smooth and solid varnish.
“You just develop all your processes around that, and you train around that and all of a sudden it becomes extremely, extremely efficient,” said Lilley. “The only custom part to powder coating is the color you’re going to paint it and the texture you’re going to paint it.”
Another example of automating everything is Protocase Designer, a custom CAD program available for free on the company’s website. Based on predefined templates, the software allows customers to quickly create 3D models of their designs that Protocase engineers can refine before the item moves into production.
“[Protocase Designer] allows the designer to very quickly move from a template base of a part and customize it to their specific needs,” said Lilley. “It depends on the complexity of the project, but we have customers that can, within 30 minutes, produce a full 3D model of their enclosure.”
Manufacturing constraints and Protocase’s mass customization principles are built right into the software, allowing the project to move from CAD straight into the workshop. But the helpful tool is merely for those who want to use it; Protocase also supports designs from more popular CAD tools such as AutoCAD and SolidWorks.
Bringing mass custom to aerospace and defense
In 2022, Protocase spun out Protospace to focus its mass custom approach on the particular requirements of the aerospace and defense sector. The industry had been “jumping out at us,” Lilley said, and was clearly in need of the deliverables that mass customization could provide.
“We are a game changer to the whole aerospace and defense sector because these are big, expensive projects,” said Lilley. “When deadlines aren’t met, that can be devastating in terms of cost, in terms of product failures.”
Protospace comes with an extra set of challenges beyond those of mass custom. Protospace must be AS9100 certified, ITAR compliant, and adhere to higher inspection and security standards than Protocase while promising the same speedy delivery for low volume, custom projects. “It’s all about checking the boxes for the aerospace world,” Lilley said.
Efficiency is always at the top of the checklist. The drive for maximum efficiency is ingrained into Protospace’s DNA, from the way staff is selected to its “everything under one roof” approach that prevents delays.
“If there’s a particular capability that we don’t have, and we feel it fits within the model to be able to provide that better solution, then we just go and build that capability in,” Lilley said.
The market needs mass custom
It’s been a long journey since that discussion over a glass of beer in the mid-1990s. Protocase’s steep growth confirmed to Lilley and Milburn their suspicion that thousands of engineering companies around the world were facing issues that other suppliers couldn’t or were unwilling to address. There was a huge gap in the market and Protocase and Protospace found the way to plug it.
“We cater to the small one and two person companies that might be operating from their backyard garage right up to the top aerospace companies in the world,” Lilley said. “Our typical client is an electrical engineer who is designing an electronic product and struggling to package that electronic product into an enclosure.”
It’s a market that bigger competitors had shunned before. But Protocase found a way to tap into its potential and make it work. The company has grown to 400 employees and serves some 18,000 clients across North America today. Even the recent economic downturn that hit the tech industry on a large scale leading to mass layoffs hasn’t stopped Protocase’s and Protospace’s growth. Quite the contrary, said Lilley; lean times are pushing companies to look for lean solutions, and the mass customization approach optimized by Lilley’s team is fitting the bill.