"This industry will not get anywhere without collaboration," those were the words of Valuechain's Jim Walters during a discussion at an event celebrating the end of a successful first day at RAPID + TCT 2019. Jim should know, seeing as Valuechain's DNA AM software was designed alongside Airbus in order to standardise aerospace additive manufacturing production processes and enable scalability in the aerospace sector.
Judging by the exhibitor booths here at the Cobo Center, Detroit, the AM industry is waking up to the power of collaboration.
- Guyson and HP
- Origin and BASF
- Yaskawa and 3D Platform
- Fives and Michelin
- Loctite and EnvisionTEC
- EOS and DyeMansion
- Dyndrite and Renishaw
Those are just a few of the names and logos I spotted walking around the show floor with the idea of collaboration percolating. These companies are proudly showing how they are working together as opposed to competing or running a program of acquisitions, as was the trend four years ago. One such company is Loctite, the division of the Henkel Corporation is here in force at RAPID with a host of real-life industry case studies, and it understands how and why collaboration is key.
"From an eco-system standpoint we realised early on that we're not a 3D printing hardware manufacturer, though initially, that was part of our investment," Carols Puente, Manager, Market and Customer Activation - 3D Printing at Loctite tells me. "We determined that it's not our expertise and there are people like Origin, like EnvisionTEC that are far more advanced than we are. So we took a step back and took a look at our hero products - the materials, the chemistry, and the science."
This philosophy of understanding your limitations at the same time as understanding what it is you're good at has resonance with yesterday's keynote from the co-founder of Fast Company, Bill Taylor. Bill urged the crowd not to look at what their competitors are doing and wonder how they could do it better but look at themselves and ask, 'why are we special? What is it we do that nobody else can?'
Thankfully, we've stepped away from that idea of a 'we do it all' 3D printing company; you're not going to find an organisation telling you that you simply need their 3D printer and voila, you have a manufacturing facility. Such is the understanding of attendees now; the likelihood is even if you did claim that you'd be laughed out of town.
Another point Jim of ValueChain made last night, and a point stressed by several others like Todd Grimm is that even if there was a one-size-fits-all solution, companies like Airbus don't want to work with just one company, they want to be technology agnostic and use what works.
Collaboration also appears to bring out the honesty in the process; it's refreshing to see that steps like post-processing or non-intrusive scanning are no longer 3D printing's dirty little secret (I once saw a company cleaning parts hidden behind the pop-up on stand) but seen as powerful enablers of a move towards production.
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Exhibit at the UK's definitive and most influential 3D printing and additive manufacturing event, TCT 3Sixty.
Just last week at Matsuura's open day back in the UK, the Japanese machine-tool OEM, now selling HP technology in the UK, told me that it was the automation of post-processing that had truly allowed them to mass-manufacture a giveaway; going from a two-day manual hand clean to a ten-minute bead blast.
If you take a look at the news coming out of RAPID, there's a focus on collaboration; Jabil and Renault F1 team collaborating on 3D printed racecar parts, SmileDirectClub targetting 20 million moulds alongside HP, Heineken implementing Ultimaker's S5 3D printing platform... it's great to see and goes a long way to justifying why we put that plus sign between RAPID and TCT in the first place.
