It's been quite a year.
One of struggle, one of anguish, one of a technology that may have previously failed to live up to such lofty promise, perhaps now finding its role in the manufacturing landscape.
Though there were plenty of businesses in the 3D printing industry that had significant issues to encounter – GE in its AM-related goodwill impairment charges or Stratasys and 3D Systems in their workforce reductions – the technology itself comes out of 2020 with an enhanced reputation.
It was responsible for millions of parts produced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, helping to alleviate slightly the pressure that medical professionals and procurement personnel were under, while allowing manufacturers to pivot from what they typically produced to what, in that moment, we needed them to.
Avi Reichental, Nexa 3D’s CEO, headed 3D Systems throughout 3D printing technology’s period of hype some ten years ago, his current company deployed its Stereolithography and Powder Bed Fusion technologies to print thousands and thousands of pandemic-related parts, and subsequent to that experience, launched the xCure post-processing station. While 2020 is not likely to be a year any of us will forget, no matter how much we might like to, Reichental believes it will be a turning point for the technology.
But not before some short-term hurdles to overcome. As a company that was working to establish itself in the additive manufacturing market, first with its NXE400 SLA offering and later its QLS portfolio through the acquisition of NXT Factory, Nexa3D was one of the lucky 3D printing vendors who successfully managed to sell 70 units through a turbulent year. That was never going to be the case across the board as manufacturers far and wide felt the pinch of economic disruptions brought on by the pandemic.
“There are going to be companies that will win during this period, because they were prepared or they have the ‘right product’ and companies that will probably feel pressure on their commercial activities,” Reichental told TCT. “For some, it will be harder to sell for a few more periods if they don’t have the right price points or if they haven’t been able to virtualise and hybridise their go-to-market [strategies]. It’s going to be challenging, particularly since many of the available customers slow down their spending, conserve cash to wait and see how they do.”
What the ‘right product’ refers to in this sector is primarily desktop printers and online service offerings, products that are low cost or easily accessed via remote locations. Reichental posits that many product companies will have bought desktop machines for engineers to take home to enable them to continue working on the design and development of parts in much the same way as other remote workers may have been given a new laptop or greater bandwidth to continue their duties.
Nexa3D COVID app
What manufacturers have been doing less and less this calendar year is making investments in larger-format machines. Ever the optimist, Reichental believes the events of 2020 will have as significant a long-term impact on the adoption of 3D printing as they have a short-term one on machine sales.
“There’s no question in my mind that the whole topic of design agility and supply chain resiliency are top of mind for many CEOs, almost for all CEOs, of product companies, which means it’s going to bode well for 3D printing post-COVID,” he offered. “There’s also no doubt in my mind that in national and international discussions around emergency preparedness, and what does one stockpile in preparation for the next unfortunate [event or] pandemic, there’s probably going to be a healthy discussion around ‘should we have 3D printers in our hospitals or in other places to be able to respond if we get caught with our trousers down because traditional supply chains can’t respond?’”
Should those discussions return a positive response for 3D printing, Reichental believes it quite possible that machine and technology suppliers will now be better placed to support manufacturers through adoption and application thanks to the insights picked up during the pandemic. For Nexa and many others, it will have been the first time that their technology was leveraged to produce parts in such volumes as thousands upon thousands of face shield and medical components were sent out the door.
“Many of us were thrusted into a situation in which we found ourselves eating our own dog food, day and night,” Reichental said. “Overnight, many of us found ourselves extending factories and beginning to print tens of thousands of parts per week. When you do that, you gain the kind of learning that typically only very few of your own super users and customers have. As a result, I think that we will see more emphasis going forward on end-to-end workflows and the interplay between machinery, chemistry and software, not only to unlock performance but assure consistency and scalability, I think this is another important trend as our industry matures.”
Facilitating this, Reichental anticipates, will be the mass cooperation of companies within the additive manufacturing space. In his last stint as the CEO of an additive company, 3D Systems and many of the other leading 3D printing brands were working towards being ‘one stop shops’ for 3D printing. Since founding Nexa 3D, however, Reichental has taken a different approach, actively working with the likes of Henkel to develop and release materials more quickly and opening up its xCure system so users of other SLA machines can use it too. After acquiring NXT Factory, meanwhile, the company quickly aligned with Siemens to enhance the QLS platforms’ automation readiness. For Reichental, the COVID-19 pandemic helped highlight the importance of collaboration.
“In the sense of collaborations, the industry is changing in front of our very eyes,” Reichental suggested. “If collaborations were aspired to pre-COVID, all of a sudden they’re happening. And I think they’re happening in part because there are a lot of things that we cannot do during COVID and so it gives us the opportunity to focus but it also, I think, exposes some of our vulnerabilities as individual companies and how the collective strength of partners can really accelerate the market.”
This coming together of companies is considered the quickest way of taking additive manufacturing technology to where the industry wants to go. But as the world ground to a halt in the spring, as people far and wide stood still, as there was more time than ever to sit and contemplate, something much bigger was brought into focus. Something that Reichental believes should be at the forefront of every additive manufacturing company’s thinking.
“How much material are we using? What kind of power inputs we put into the manufacturer? Can you reduce the amount of material? Can you minimise supports? Can you measure and optimise the power? How much scrap rate? What kind of yields are you getting per part and what can you do about it? How much more can you dial the whole process? And then, of course, can you design parts in a way that they would have a second life? For Nexa, we’re taking on the whole circular economy topic very, very seriously [but] this is another area that no one company can accomplish on its own,” Reichental finishes.
“This is an area that is super important to the planet and to our industry. And it’s an area that’s begging for standards, for collaboration and for new critical thinking to make it an embedded part of everything that we do. And if we’re really serious about taking additive to the next level, that has got to be a cornerstone of what we do. And I think COVID is helpful to that just because it gave us an opportunity to pull back and reflect about how much better the world can be if we really begin to take action on it.”
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