Speaker 1 (00:00):
The whole world has been set up on producing the same thing at the least cost possible and making as many of them that are exactly the same. It’s been a paradigm shift to get to this point where we can produce 10,000 of something and each one’s different.
Stephanie Hendrixson (00:13):
When we think about mass customization, like that opens the door to, if you can just tweak this product a little bit, suddenly you can reach a hundred percent of the customers with something that suits their needs.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
As we get into our conversation, the one question about a vision that I have is that what if every product that we interacted with is made essentially on demand and customized for us? I hope that we can have some fun talking about that today.
Stephanie Hendrixson (00:44):
Sounds great.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Stephanie, in your mind, what does mass customization and production, those are two separate questions. I apologize in advance. But what does mass customization and production actually look like to you in additive manufacturing today?
Stephanie Hendrixson (00:59):
So I’ll answer the second part first maybe. Production for us is we take a pretty wide view of it. If somebody is making end use parts additively, that to us is production. And it doesn’t matter if they’ve made one patient customized implant that way or they’re making thousands and thousands of the same bracket over and over that’s going to go into a plane or a car or something like that. For us, it’s the application. If it’s going into an end use assembly or maybe it’s going directly to a consumer, that for us is production. And I guess really the distinction is, is it tooling or is it a production part? So if it’s a mold tool, if it’s a robot gripper or if it’s something like that, we would think of that as tooling versus production. It’s going out into the world, it’s being sold, it’s being maybe used directly or indirectly by somebody.
(01:52):
Mass customization for me, I think is this idea that every single part can be a little bit different and maybe it’s not that different. So one of the companies I’ve reported on in the past is Fitz Frames. They make glasses frames, and so they’ve got maybe let’s say six base designs. They don’t vary that much in terms of the shape, but they are going to be sized to your face. You do have a couple of color options. So each pair of glasses is maybe not that different from every other pair of glasses, but there is going to be variation. So anything from that sort of situation where it’s the same product over and over and you’re just tweaking the size and the shape and the color all the way to this is an implant for a condition that only you have and only you have your unique geometry and your unique anatomy. This is not going to look like anybody else’s facial implant or cranial implant.
(02:47):
So I think there’s degrees of mass customization, but for me, the defining factor is that it’s not identical on purpose. It is customized, it is tailored, it is tweaked in whatever particular way that it needs to be tweaked.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
As you shared that, and no point did you share about volumes, number of parts being made.
Stephanie Hendrixson (03:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
It’s almost like as we talk about volume with additive manufacturing, we’re doing ourselves a disservice because volume really isn’t a critical component of the picture.
Stephanie Hendrixson (03:19):
With injection molding, you’re only serving maybe 80% of the potential customer base because it’s only going to be good enough for that 80%. And then when we think about mass customization, that opens the door to if you can just tweak this product a little bit for every person, suddenly you could reach a hundred percent of the customers with something that they want and something that fits them and something that suits their needs.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
The whole world has been set up on producing the same thing at the least cost possible and making as many of them that are exactly the same. It’s been a paradigm shift to get to this point where we can produce 10,000 of something and each one’s individual, each one’s different.
Stephanie Hendrixson (03:58):
I think a lot of things in additives still come back to materials. I think we’re still looking for the best fit materials, but I also think that there is just a lack of demand and awareness because for the average person, if you stop someone on the sidewalk and ask them what’s the price of a custom pair of shoes? I don’t know what they would guess, but it would be a very high number I would think. With 3D printing, I think we are going to be able to see the cost of these things come down and make it more possible for the average person to walk into a shoe store and get scanned and order a pair of shoes just for them or a pair of insoles just for them.
(04:39):
The other aspect of it is design, which I know that you all with Threedom have experienced as well. But if all the possibilities are manufacturable, okay, that’s great, but who’s going to sit down and design all those possibilities? And we need the software tools, we need the AI, we need parametric design strategies to make it possible as well. So there’s a hardware component, there’s a cost component, there’s an awareness component, but there is also that design component on the backend that’s really, really important too.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
And it seems like where it could all come together is if we can increase the lifespan or dramatically increase the value of a customized shoe where it lasts longer and is way more comfortable. Now it’s the logical choice because it’s not a shoe that’s going to last a year or two years. This is something you can hold on to for a while.
Stephanie Hendrixson (05:28):
We did an episode with Aetrex and they offer a 3D printed insole. I’m not sure if this is still the case, but I believe at the time EOS was doing all the printing for them. So my co-host, Pete and I each got to have our feet scanned. We each got a pair of these insoles. I put them into my indoor workout shoes at home, and I wore them for the next five years. I only just now replaced the shoes and I moved the insoles into the next pair of shoes. Exactly what you’re saying. It made this pair of shoes have such a much longer lifespan than it would have because they fit better. They were way more comfortable. The only reason I ended up buying new ones was because the tread on the bottom had basically worn away and I had no grip left on the outside, but the interior was still great. It was still perfectly comfortable.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
It’s neat to hear the additively manufactured insole outlasting the shoe itself. And there’s a believability gap that I think that exists on how durable additive manufactured components can be. If you talk to a general consumer and you talk about additive manufacturing, they picture a filament printer. So there’s this big gap that exists. How do you see that playing out?
Stephanie Hendrixson (06:41):
Definitely like any conversation with somebody outside of manufacturing, that’s exactly where we have to start is, “Oh, you write about 3D printing. My nephew has a 3D printer. I’ve seen the 3D printers at the library.” Yeah, they’re picturing exactly that, the filament printer. I think that there is a little bit of lack of awareness even among people in manufacturing. Sometimes I’ll talk to somebody who is deeply involved in let’s say, resin 3D printing. They know everything there is to know about DLP and SLA and all the available materials and how this process works. And then at some point in the conversation, they’ll start asking questions. “Okay, but like laser powder bed fusion, how does that work?” And it’s like we all have our blinders. We all have our own specific expertise and we do need to be better.
(07:28):
Getting back to this whole idea of communicating, we need good examples of all the different technologies out there, all the different applications out there. It’s hard to know what you don’t know. And so the more that I can get out there and do my job and talk to people doing different things, and the more that I can find people that want to share their work, I think the better off we all are as manufacturers. And then also trying to get that out into the general public too.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
What you just shared to me painted a picture in my mind of how much depth is required for any one particular subset of additive manufacturing. You were talking about resin printing. I think we’ve talked about this, but I don’t know that I’ve thought about it this way. It’s as if each technology, because we’re still charting a course, requires so much depth to learn and master, that it’s difficult to get to that depth and then be able to do that across a great breadth of different technologies, different methods. And I think we’re in that same place with, of course, technologies we don’t operate.
Stephanie Hendrixson (08:32):
Yeah, but you all are experts in Multi Jet Fusion and the equipment that’s in your facility. So yeah, you have the depth in the specific technology that really matters for you, but maybe it doesn’t translate to somebody working in metals or working with some other process.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
It’ll be neat to see how our industry continues to evolve. And I suspect as we’re charting those courses today and we have been for years, we, the industry, we’ll find ourselves in a place where we can start to standardize some of that knowledge and it becomes more accessible for experts to sort of cross-pollinate the breadth rather than just in a silo of depth.
Stephanie Hendrixson (09:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
So you talked about something I want to dive a little bit deeper into. You talked a little bit about design and you talked about AI. We started with one single product and as we started interacting with the market, we started to learn all the other nuances and nuanced design options that customers could benefit from, that they wanted. And we pretty quickly found ourselves in this mass parametric equation, to use your word, that had an almost infinite variable. And as we got into that and started building out the variations, we found ourselves with this design matrix that was extraordinarily complex. And I think today we have 50,000 design files or print files that we can produce from.
(10:02):
And I think if you would have said to us at the beginning that you’re going to have 50,000 design files, I’m not sure what we would have thought, but going through it in an incremental fashion allowed us to develop the tools to build the files so that we didn’t have to do that with manual labor. But that was just the tip of the iceberg and that was five years ago. What innovation are you seeing in this space with AI and design to help elevate additive manufacturing and design?
Stephanie Hendrixson (10:32):
The best example that I can give you is this past week I was at RAPID. I stopped into the HP booth and they have this thing called Text to 3D. And so it’s sort of a ChatGPT type interface where you can describe what it is that you want. So the example that they had in their booth, they had this souped up race car, and with the AI demo you could customize kind of the central medallion. And so in the demo that I did, they asked, “Okay, pick a material. What’s your favorite animal?” I said, “Titanium. Penguins.” And so it spit out four different just 2D drawings of different arrangements of penguins in this medallion. And then once you select one from there, at that point, that’s when the software starts to render what it would look like in 3D and tries to make sure that it’s going to be printable and all these things.
(11:28):
But as far as whether you could use that to design say an industrial part, like a gear or a valve, I am curious to see if we get to a point where CAD design becomes more tweaking based on what an AI has spit out or if we ever get to the point where it’s possible to fully describe the part that you need and then fully get an AI generated version of that.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Where do you see it going?
Stephanie Hendrixson (11:56):
I think there’s some really great opportunities for AI in terms of machine monitoring and process improvement. Some of the most exciting things I see with AI right now are how we’re able to train these models to look at maybe thousands of laser powder bed fusion layers and okay, what’s the laser power? What’s the temperature in the bed? Whatever particular factors you’re interested in, and can you correlate that back to the design and try to figure out what happened in the build. And I think the ability for an AI to interpret all of this data that we are able to capture through this process is going to be really powerful and could potentially lead to a faster route to qualification for some of these parts, better machine monitoring, just better process control overall. I’ve heard people talk about the potential to monitor remote builds, so if you’re thinking about distributed manufacturing, how do you make sure that your supplier is building the part exactly the way that you need them to? AI might be key to that.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
It seems like the equipment manufacturers and some of the closed platforms that are out there haven’t gotten to the point where they’ve got a system in place or the willingness to have that sort of experience. So it’ll be neat to see how that transforms where traditionally closed systems become more open and integrated with AI so that you can collect and manipulate that data.
(13:25):
Well, Stephanie, it’s been a great pleasure to host you as our guest today. Truly great conversation and appreciate you sharing your perspective in helping educate others on your journey in learning additive manufacturing.
Stephanie Hendrixson (13:39):
Thank you for having me. It’s been a fun discussion and I’m glad to have the opportunity.
MUSIC (13:44):
(Music)
