Fast Radius was recently recognised as one of the world's leading digital factories.
Just minutes away from where the additive manufacturing (AM) elite recently gathered in Chicago for the Additive Manufacturing Users Group conference, one of the world’s leading digital factories stands.
On the lips of the thousands of end-users at the annual AMUG event was talk of additive for production, Industry 4.0, and the more recent trend towards maintaining the “digital thread”. Down the street at Fast Radius, those conversation topics are not simply a goal to strive for but a reality of what happens when you combine hardware, software and logistics with a mission to make new things possible.
Saving this Editor a short Uber trip, the company’s Co-founder and CEO, Lou Rassey was on-hand to discuss partnerships with some of the industry’s now leading OEMs and share his view on how AM is shaking up the supply chain.
“We think manufacturing is really important not just for the things that it makes but for the things that it makes possible,” Rassey told TCT. “Manufacturers just don't make cars and cell phones and satellites - manufacturers make the world more connected, make the world healthier, and we power and feed the world with the things that we make.”
I meet with Rassey ahead of a customer panel session with HP, one of Fast Radius’ production partners. He believes there are two big challenges facing the industry today; helping companies uncover suitable applications to make a business case for AM and having a trusted supply chain to back it up.
“Over the last 30 years, the industry has primarily been served by service bureaus that are focused on prototyping, as opposed to the reliable repeatable high-volume production infrastructure that companies need to have to embrace this as a production technology,” Rassey explains. “What we do at Fast Radius is we help companies bring additive manufacturing into their products and business models and scale with them across the lifecycle.”
Fast Radius' Chicago HQ houses one of the world's largest Carbon M2 production facilities.
Fast Radius started out in 2015 in a strategic partnership with shipping and logistics giant, UPS fuelled by a shared vision of additive as a supply chain solution. With offices currently located in Atlanta and Singapore and a factory inside UPS’ Louisville hub, its Chicago HQ has been in operation for only a year and already earned itself recognition as one of the nine best digital factories in the world according to the World Economic Forum, the only recipient of the accolade in North America. Machines from HP, Carbon and Stratasys fill the production floor, supported by a host of end-to-end technologies from design to digital metrology, each connected by a first-of-its-kind operating system which takes parts all the way from application discovery through to production and fulfilment. The company is completely technology agnostic with the caveat that the machines it selects are all considered ready for industrial and volume applications.
“I think it's important for designers and manufacturers to understand that the additive we grew up with a decade ago is very different to what is now possible today,” Rassey notes, alluding to the industry’s shift away from prototyping to production.
Back in 2017, Fast Radius was selected as one of the first launch partners to implement Carbon’s M2 system based on its Digital Light Synthesis technology and currently houses the largest Carbon production facility in the Western Hemisphere. With its HP Multi Jet Fusion capacity, the company has been tasked with producing final parts for HP itself including its Print, Personal Systems and 3D Printing products.
“Multi Jet Fusion and Carbon and Stratasys all have different parts of the application space where they are well suited for end part use,” Rassey explained. “They have crossed the tipping point where the economics can rival legacy production methods like injection moulding, and their materials offer the performance that's necessary for end-use part application. We're working across the technology ecosystem. Ultimately, our customers come to us to help solve a business problem and then we can steer them to the right technology platform and the right materials.”
Fast Radius collaborated with Steelcase on the redesign of its popular office chair.
Those customers and applications range between anything from automotive interiors to industrial products. Furniture company, Steelcase, worked with Fast Radius to develop armrests for its flagship SILQ office chair. Using’ Carbon’s Digital Light Synthesis technology, they were able to print the entire armrest as a single part and reduce material usage by up to 70 percent with internal lattice structures. It’s also collaborating with companies like Husqvarna Group, a Swedish manufacturer of outdoor power tools, to create a virtual warehouse for producing parts on-demand. Most recently, Fast Radius teamed with Bastian Solutions to develop a new robot warehouse picker using polymer technologies from Carbon and HP.
Like many others flying the flag for the maturation of AM, Fast Radius says it wants to help companies to understand where additive does and does not make sense. To achieve this, it has introduced two initiatives; the Application Launch Program, designed to help companies identify and develop applications, and the Total Value of Additive framework which helps businesses to think about AM in a quantifiable way.
Some of the most heavily touted promises of additive manufacturing centre on its ability to bring parts closer to the point of use, reduce inventory and change the way products travel. Scott Price, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at UPS, recently spoke about how large inventories and slow-moving goods “will become a distant memory” as factories adapt to a more customer-driven ethos and products, including replacement parts, are shipped when and where they are needed. To that end, Fast Radius is leveraging what it refers to as the “Fourth Modality of Logistics”, transporting parts around the world via the internet as opposed to the traditional ground, air and sea form of shipment.
Streamlining Husqvarna Group’s spare parts supply chain with 3D printing.
“Our aspiration is to build out a global network of industrial grade additive production facilities that are all digitally connected, that allow this to be possible,” Rassey explained. “We are implementing a broad suite of Industry 4.0 technologies, additive manufacturing equipment and materials certainly being a big part of that, but also new tools of digital design, tools of simulation, analytics, new digital metrology tools, new supply chain solutions on the back-end. For us, it is the integration of this big portfolio of Industry 4.0 tools that we have brought to bear.”
Fast Radius is evaluating emerging technologies all the time and it is onboarding new systems every quarter but Rassey stresses that a trusted supply chain does not come from the machine alone and is making considerable efforts to build out its operating system to ensure reliable, repeatable production.
“We think software is at the heart of this digital manufacturing revolution and is as important as the innovations in equipment and materials,” Rassey added.
My conversation with Rassey comes just days after Fast Radius announced an additional 48 million USD in Series B funding led by UPS with substantial contributions from Drive Capital to accelerate the expansion of its software platform and scale up its AM capacity. With whispers of a potential partnership with Desktop Metal, a company which has been flying the flag for additive production on the metals front following the commercial launch of its Production System last year, I ask Rassey if metals might be on the horizon.
“We are always scanning the landscape and spend time with new technologies that are coming to market. We're excited to enter into metals this year … more news on that coming soon.”
