How to prepare for 3D manufacturing

We’re seeing a shift in how goods and services are consumed.
Driven by the global move towards sustainability, fewer
businesses and consumers feel the need to individually
purchase, own, and maintain various material assets. From
Netjets to AirBnB and Zipcar to Buzzcar, US and European
consumers have been flocking toward the “Sharing Economy.”
With the advent of 3D manufacturing—sophisticated printers that
add layers-upon-layers of different types of print material to
construct anything from rubber ducks to automobiles— the
supply side, too, will shift—goods will no longer be designed,
made, and distributed from the top down. Over the next 20 years
we will see the widespread adoption of 3D manufacturing.
The implications for supply chains and manufacturing are far-
reaching—properly realized, 3D manufacturing has the potential
to create more parity among economies and to alleviate
structural imbalances.
Currently, where global mass manufacturing is located is often
determined by the cost of a country’s labor force. That can
become a zero sum rivalry between winners and losers. The
labor winners who are growing their share of manufacturing
labor, such as China, have developed economies with low labor
costs and the ability to produce on a mass scale. By contrast,
manufacturing labor in industrialized countries is often more
expensive and gets reduced, which also makes it harder to
further evolve manufacturing competitiveness. Then, in winning
countries wages rise and mass manufacturers often move on to
the next low-cost market.
3D manufacturing has the potential to equalize this tension
somewhat. Local 3D printing, or additive manufacturing, reduces
some of the other costs in manufacturing value chains, such as
logistics and transportation of finished goods, because
production can become more localized and immediate. Social
networks and SAAS-based data analytics could also help reduce
the singular reliance on large corporations to provide co-working
infrastructure and trust mechanisms that carry a lot of
administrative overhead.
The cost of the printers are also continuing to fall, making one-
offs and small runs affordable and allowing more consumers
access to obtain control and instant gratification in a
decentralized and distributed manufacturing process.[1] And
people won’t need to be experts to do this—they will depend on
the help of developers, hobbyists, hackers, and other consumers
to create designs for new products. These manufacturing
communities will hold most of the critical assets for
experimentation and production.
This type of agile and loosely structured cooperative will lead to
new ventures, with new behaviors of production and new ways
of minimizing transaction cost—a phenomenon we’ve dubbed
“Swarm Economics.” Disparate and diverse sets of producer-
consumers will come together in forums online, responding to
each others’ needs, offering ideas, designs, materials and
reciprocal services to each other. They will form in small or large
groups on an ad hoc, irregular basis, depending on the needs in
question. They will pay, barter, and trade in currency, know-how,
assets, and channels.
At the heart of these groups and Swarm Economics is 3D
manufacturing. With 3D manufacturing, entrepreneurs have the
opportunity to develop new applications and business models,
businesses can manufacture spare parts on an as-needed basis,
and companies can harness 3D printing technology as a way to
on-shore long lost manufacturing jobs. Managers need to
harvest these groups within their own ecosystem. In order to do
so, managers must provide value to the swarm. They can do so
by creating stability where many questions remain around 3D
manufacturing and the Makers’ / DIY movement, from
environmental to safety to labor regulations. To answer these
questions, company leaders can become stewards of 3D
manufacturing by supplementing traditional manufacturing with
experimentation and learning from 3D printing—for instance,
how to best utilize its capabilities and under which
circumstances that are least damaging to workers and the
environment.
How to prepare: recommendations for executives
3D manufacturing is undoubtedly the future—the opportunities in
cost savings and customizable products are hard to ignore.
However, possible risks must also be considered. For instance,
current 3D printers have high energy consumption and pose
health risks from airborne particle emissions.[2] Better printer
design and reduction of dependence on plastics are areas for
improvement. To benefit from 3D manufacturing and triumph
over traditional manufacturing driven by cheap labor, we
recommend a series of dialogues among company leadership to
be better prepared to take part in this new economy:
· Exercise more detailed foresight and assess the risks and
benefits of shifting enterprise activity to localized 3D
manufacturing, including accounting and tax implications.
Assess areas where 3D manufacturing might enhance existing
manufacturing processes or create new market opportunities.
· Collect data on 3D printers and craft blueprints for health,
safety, liability, and labor regulations for a new distributed
manufacturing paradigm. Without regulations in place, the
advantages of 3D manufacturing may be undercut by
institutional fears of associated dangers. The knowledge an
enterprise can provide can assuage concerns and accelerate
adoption of 3D manufacturing.
· Evaluate human capital needs. Create programs to train
software and hardware technicians to operate 3D printers and
train employees in the existing supply chain to support 3D
manufacturing needs, including sourcing raw materials. Analysis
of how local cooperatives can become an asset and what they
mean for social cohesion and local socio-economic development
will also support the decentralizing of mass manufacturing.
· Develop corporate strategies that take account of the collapse
of the value chain. Assess how existing vendors, distributors,
and retailers might be affected, and how they might also be able
to assist in a 3D manufacturing process. For instance, might
retailers themselves be both the point of sale and the point of 3D
manufacturing?
With 3D printing, the distributed production economy can
alleviate structural imbalances, injustices and diseconomies, if
we manage with foresight.