US Reliant has proposed and filed for a patent on a new way of manufacturing called “fractional manufacturing”. While I believe the idea has many advantages for manufacturers, I never considered how fractional ownership can be used as a benefit in owning a pet. Well, now we have FlexPetz. You can become a member and share ownership of a dog so that you only “use” the pet when you want the benefits of owning a pet.

I thought fractional ownership of manufacturing assets made complete sense by only taking advantage of the benefits of ownership when it is needed. I guess I feel vindicated in a way, however, I am not sure I would have chosen this method of vindication.

Click here to view a recent article.

Writing in Design News this month, Senior Editor Joseph Ogando raises the question of whether the term, “rapid prototyping” has outgrown its moniker.

Among the points Ogando correctly makes is that increasingly rapid prototyping machines are being put into service for producing finished or nearly finished product parts – not just prototypes.

“Plenty of users have gotten wise to these benefits and started to press their rapid prototyping machines into production duties, particularly for low-volume or custom products,” he writes. Ogando notes that 42 percent of Stratasys’ prototyping machine customers make at least some production parts, while 11 percent use their machines exclusively for production.

Once terms become part of the American vernacular, they are often hard to shake. Among examples that come to mind are hitting the “rewind” button on a DVD player; “cutting” and “pasting” on our word processors, and viewing a “film” in digital movie theaters.

Ogando endorses the suggestion of one pundit that all prototyping machines be dubbed “3D Printers,” although the journalist concedes the term currently is most associated with low-cost prototyping machines, not the costlier models best-suited to actual low-volume manufacturing.

In the end, it doesn’t much matter – really – what we call these technological wonders, just so long as they continue to gain popularity and help restore America’s manufacturing prowess.

One day, we believe, rapid-prototyping machines or 3D printers or replicators or whatever the public ultimately chooses to call them will be ubiquitous, as commonplace in homes and businesses as telefacsimile and tabulating machines (faxes and computers).

In the spirit of our corporate mission, we offer our own nomination into the naming derby: “RAMP Machines”, as in Restoring America’s Manufacturing Prowess!

Despite the many benefits that rapid manufacturing technologies (RPT) afford small manufacturers, only 15 to 20 percent of potential end users globally have availed themselves of these innovative manufacturing processes.

That is the conclusion of Frost & Sullivan, a global growth consultancy, that recently issued a study on the global rapid prototyping equipment market.

While the automotive and aerospace industries have been early adopters of RPT, most other prospective users remain largely unaware of the RPT’s potential for them, noted S. Vidyansankar, a senior research analyst at the Palo Alto-based consulting company.

Frost & Sullivan forecast that rapid manufacturing will become mainstream in the future and thereby drive the growth of the rapid prototyping equipment market to roughly $860 million in revenues in 2013.

Frost & Sullivan noted that in addition to providing small companies extremely affordable concept modeling and design optimization, the use of additive fabrication technology to directly manufacture the products is increasingly popular, especially for low-volume applications.

Rapid manufacturing works particularly well with complex part designs that are difficult to conceive in traditional manufacturing processes, Frost & Sullivan noted. One example the consulting company cited is the use of RPT in the manufacture of hearing aids.

Rockford, Illinois Seeks To Replace Lost Jobs Using Fresh Manufacturing Technologies

On the surface, Rockford, Illinois appears to be an ideal location for both businesses and families.

Located in the northern part of the state along the Rock River, the city promotes itself as one that offers “the attractions and services of a big city, but with the pace and lifestyle of a smaller town.”

Indeed, although Rockford with a population of more than 150,000 people is the state’s third largest municipality, it is blessed with affordable housing on tree-lined streets, solid schools and plenty of arts and leisure activities. With a rapidly growing airport, ready access to major highways and rail lines, the city is also an attractive business hub.

But like so many great American cities, the greater Rockford area has seen its manufacturing base rapidly erode. Over the past six years, more than 13,000 Rockford-area manufacturing jobs have evaporated. That’s a huge hit for a city of its size.

But Rockford isn’t resigned to the inevitability of lost manufacturing. Area businesses, along with Universities and several non-profits, are hoping to use advanced manufacturing technologies, including micro-machining, to revitalize the area’s manufacturing base.

One step in that direction was a rapid-prototyping fair held in June in Rockford with the aim of introducing area engineers, machinists and business owners to the newly emerging technologies they may wish to adopt.

As reported by Nate Legue in the Rockford Register Star, organizers of the Rockford rapid-prototyping fair understand that in a competitive global marketplace, the kind of speed and flexibility required to prosper is beyond the capacity of a typical machine shop.

As reporter Legue wrote, rapid-prototyping “can turn a computer-drafted design into a prototype made of ABS plastic, polymers or even a metal alloy in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks.”

One attendee interviewed by Legue noted that currently his company must do a full production run on a single piece when it wants to try a new part design. The company machines the prototype out of metal or another material and must start the entire process over if it makes an error. Rapid prototyping offers a faster, less expensive alternative.

Among the dozens of mock-ups on display at the Rockford fair were those made from ABS plastic, including exhaust vents, gearboxes and lots of toys, the Rockford Register reported.

I believe that fractional manufacturing could be one of the most significant advancements in manufacturing for the last 20 years or so.

In the late 1970’s and 1980’s we began to see a movement away from asset ownership and into outsourced manufacturing as a way to have parts produced without capital expenditures in manufacturing assets. This eventually led to us into an era of offshoring manufacturing processes to places like China, Brazil and Mexico… What did we lose in the process? We lost ownership of assets and ownership of processes. As a country we took our eyes off of the manufacturing sector in order to pursue the information revolution. Why? Frankly, manufacturing was no longer sexy. The information revolution was simply more attractive. We hope to reenergize manufacturing in the US.

Our goals with fractional manufacturing are five-fold.

1. Repatriate Manufacturing: We believe that there is a substantial portion of the manufacturing sector that can be repatriated given a model that allows for ownership and control of assets. This does not mean that we are anti-globalization. We do maintain that until now globalization has been a one-way ticket overseas because prior to fractional manufacturing there was simply no way to make manufacturing assets productive enough to compete on a global scale.
2. Cause corporate America to rethink the Value of Asset Ownership: Assets have value. Corporate America took the easy street to increased productivity. Instead of making manufacturing assets more productive we simply outsourced everything to countries that had an economic advantage in labor.
3. Encourage Green Manufacturing Methods: Green manufacturing technologies cost more than less environmentally friendly options. Is it a wonder that companies are slow to adopt greener methods? By fractionalizing greener more expensive manufacturing assets we spread those extra costs thinly across many companies that are participating in the asset thereby taking the sting out of employing greener methods.
4. Develop a Vibrant Manufacturing Base and Talent Pool to Bolster National Security: It is our interest as a country to retain ownership of manufacturing assets and processes for national security reasons. We also need a labor force capable of managing manufacturing processes.
5. Revitalize the Manufacturing Jobs Base: The fallacy of becoming an information or service economy lies in the assumption that we have a workforce that is ready to fill those roles. Not only is that short-sighted but the argument ultimately leads to a smaller middle-class with two extremes; a white collar information class and a retail Wal-Mart checker class. We cannot let this happen.

The glue that binds all of this together is the concept of socially responsible manufacturing. We want to create a manufacturing system that is socially responsible and more accountable. We want to encourage consumers to purchase goods that are manufactured in a socially responsible manner.

So, what about the Ark?

Alex Linde and I were having a discussion the other day while building out the pricing model for US Reliant’s Fractional Manufacturing program. I had always hoped that cost would always figure prominently into the model as an important efficiency that we could realize with fractional manufacturing.

Alex proposed something different. What if, speaking of the product development supply chain, we could compete on speed and quality? He believed strongly that speed and quality should be enough to drive this manufacturing sector. He described our business to me as building an Ark, a vessel that will enable us to repatriate and rescue critical manufacturing processes. I liked the image. Unlike Alex though, I feel strongly that we can eventually compete on price. The economics make this indisputable. The reason that corporate America has not been able to “compete on price” is due to a lack of understanding about the true costs associated with outsourced manufacturing.

On the whole, US Manufacturing is perched in a very precarious position right now.

Why not help build the Ark?

David McInnis, CEO
US Reliant

About a year ago (August 4th, 2006) I sold PRWeb to Vocus. I owned and operated PRWeb for the better part of a decade. It was a successful venture and we had a ton of fun building that business. In July 2006, knowing that the sale was eminent, I moved Alex Linde, an analyst for me at PRWeb, to head up a group in Springville, Utah we called Chispa Labs (pronounced cheese pah, a Spanish word for “little spark”.)

Chispa’s main reason for existing was to look out over the horizon to uncover new opportunities. And it worked too well. It became clear that opportunities would soon threaten to outpace my budget. We explored everything ranging from going into the publishing business, starting other Internet-based businesses, casual dining franchise opportunities, brick and mortar retail and more. Chispa Fun, a retail Vespa and Segway dealership in Bellingham, WA was one of the businesses to emerge from this incubator – mostly because it is a retail business that would require very little of my attention leaving me plenty of time to pursue my pilot training.

Learning to fly would ultimately lead me down the path of buying a small Cessna 182 and research into fractional biz jet ownership. Fly anywhere of consequence in a Cessna 182 and you quickly develop a requirement to get places faster. The 182 is great but a trip from Bellingham to Salt Lake City could take five plus hours. I needed something faster. So I began looking at various fractional jet ownership programs that are available and other alternatives to moving myself back and forth between Utah and Washington.

Perhaps the most important company to come out of Chispa Labs is Tangible Express, a rapid prototyping and rapid manufacturing company that we located in the Chispa offices in Springville, UT. Tangible Express is important not necessarily for what it does but for what it has inspired.

As we studied the rapid prototyping / rapid manufacturing business it became clear that the service provider portion of the business had become highly commoditized. Buying decisions, it seemed, were made almost exclusively on price. Questions began to arise. How do we differentiate ourselves in this increasingly crowded space? Is price the only area that we can compete? What about competing on capacity? What if we could provide speed and quality while being price neutral?

This is where we come back to aviation. I was in Austin, TX in January visiting my friends at the Wizard Academy (highly recommend) and JP Engelbrecht and I were talking about fractional business jet ownership. He was considering fractional ownership in the Eclipse VLJ and pointed me to a company that was offering fractional ownership in the Eclipse jets. I went to this company’s web site and as I reviewed their materials a light went off. What if we overlayed this business model on the rapid prototyping industry? Would it work to answer those questions that we had been struggling with for the prior two months? I called Alex and asked his to try overylaying the fractional business jet model on our business model to see if we could discover some efficiencies.

I was very encouraged when I saw that it could be applied to our business. We could move our new machines into inventory and fractionalize ownership. By shifting the ownership of the asset to our customer we could remove that expense from our costs and provide a cost savings to our customer ensuring a loyal customer base and facilitating economies of scale. There was an even more intriguing prospect to this idea. If, as a fractional owner, I made a purchase in a single rapid prototyping technology I could trade my allotted build time on other rapid prototyping technologies as the need arose. This is something that I could not do as a traditional owner of a single rapid prototyping technology.

So, I began to dream. What if I could do the same thing with other manufacturing processes such as CNC milling, injection-molding, laser cutting, nano-manufacturing, EDM, etc? Would it be possible for someone that owned a fraction of a rapid prototyping machine to exchange time not only for other rapid prototyping processes but to move up and down the supply chain based on their ability to trade on their asset ownership? What if I could sell someone a fraction of an injection-molding machine and they could access rapid prototyping machine by trading injection-molding capacity for the amount of rapid prototyping capacity that they need?

Witness the birth of our patent-pending* Fractional Manufacturing and the renewal of US Asset-Based Manufacturing.

*(More on why we patented this process later, I promise.)

David McInnis, CEO
US Reliant

What follows is a verbatim transcript of Dean Rotbart’s recent interview with Todd A. Grimm:

ROTBART:      Hello, I’m Dean Rotbart and I’ll be your host for this edition of the US Reliant podcast.  Today, we’ll be taking a look at one of the Rapid Prototyping-Rapid Manufacturing industry’s shakers, one of the movers and shakers of the industry; he is Todd A. Grimm of T.A. Grimm & Associates. 

Todd is the founder and President of T.A. Grimm & Associates and is well known throughout the Rapid Prototyping-Rapid Manufacturing industry, both as a consultant as well as an accomplished writer and public speaker.  Being able to listen to Todd and hear his thoughts on the industry, I believe, will be valuable to anybody who is already involved in the industry or is looking to get involved in this industry. 

Since I myself am a relative newcomer to the Rapid Prototyping-Rapid Manufacturing industry, I began my conversation with Todd Grimm by pointing out that, to my point of view, it seems that the industry should be much larger and much more successful, given the innovative technology that it encompasses than it is, and I began by commenting to him that I thought the industry really was small compared to what its potential is: 

GRIMM:          I’ve been disbelieving that we haven’t been bigger just on straight-up prototyping since day one.  It’s funny, I just read an article coming from Business 2.0, picking up on a couple of service bureaus just doing straight-up prototyping, and one throws out the line, “we hope to be the Kinko’s of Rapid Prototyping.”  And I scoffed, I honestly laughed, because the reason I got into this is business is I read an article in 1988 in a magazine called Success, it’s primarily for… 

What happened?  I mean in 1994, we were talking about how this is going to revolutionize production tooling.  

ROTBART:      I know it. 

GRIMM:          It’s a single column and it was about Rapid Prototyping and it becoming a service organization, becoming the “Kinko’s of Rapid Prototyping.”  Well, the guy who was quoted was my former boss when I was in the CAD/CAM marketplace.  I called him and congratulated him on getting in this industry so quickly.  Well, he turned around and said “Come join me in this venture.”  That was in 1990. 

ROTBART:      Let me read something to you, okay? 

GRIMM:          Sure. 

ROTBART:      Rapid Prototyping Moves Towards Rapid Tooling, by Joseph Ogando.  “No longer just for making prototype parts, Rapid Manufacturing systems offer promising shortcuts to production tooling.  Imagine if mold-making were this easy.” and I’m skipping around, it quotes you in here, I don’t want to say when.  Do you know what year that was written? 

GRIMM:          I’ve known Joe, I’ve worked giving Joe stuff probably over the last eight years, so I’m guessing it’s circa end of 1990’s. 

ROTBART:      1994, January.  

GRIMM:          I didn’t realize I’d even contributed that early. 

ROTBART:      Todd Grimm, Manager of Laser Prototypes, Inc. 

GRIMM:          Oh, my Gosh. 

ROTBART:      The five year-old stereoithographic service bureau does more than 80% of its business in plastics.  What happened, I mean in 1994, we were talking about how this is going to revolutionize production tooling. 

GRIMM:          What happened was we, and the rest of the industry, came out and said we’ve got a much faster way that will also be cheaper to get you injection molds.  We thought that was it; that was the end-all-be-all.  And we thought people would just knock down our door to get this.  It makes sense, doesn’t it?  And this is at a time when prototype tooling was taking easily eight weeks.  But eight, ten, twelve weeks was really common.  We could do this process on almost anything you threw at us in two to four weeks, to give you injection-molded parts.  Dean, what could be more obvious? 

ROTBART:      Right, it’s building the better mousetrap.    GRIMM:          Exactly.  Well, what happened was, first off, what we were pitching, there were too many negatives.  So, we’d call people and they would say, “alright, faster is good, cheaper is good.  Now, Todd, what’s the tool life?”  “Uh, well, it’s about 30 to 50 parts for your plastic.”  This is compared to prototype tooling they’re used to that can deliver tens of thousands of pieces.  “Todd, what’s your accuracy?”  We were like ten-fold higher on being inaccurate, and they just went down the laundry list of how they would conventionally qualify tooling, and although there are these huge benefits of speed and cost, there was a huge number of negatives.  What happened was, if there was anybody in the manufacturing realm, this isn’t really design-engineering world now, this is moving into tooling/manufacturing/engineering, if there was anybody in the client company who did not believe that this was a strong solution, they had so much firepower to shoot anybody down who even dared to enter their office to say let’s try this, if they wanted to.  So, you needed a real strong champion, but also you needed an openness in the corporation to try something dramatically different, and also to invest the time to learn when it made the most sense to apply it.  Because it wasn’t for everything.  You had to pick and choose your marks carefully.  The other aspect of it is even if we found somebody who wanted to, there were so many limitations on the process that, let’s say you had a widget and that widget needed ten injection-molded parts, well, it was very likely we could do three of the ten.   ROTBART:      Interesting. 

ROTBART:      So who will be the ones to embrace Rapid Prototyping and Rapid Manufacturing to solve the impossible, to deliver new products and new ideas that become large commercial successes?  Don’t look now, but Todd Grimm believes it will be the good ol’ American entrepreneur.  He or she who has belief in himself, who goes out, takes the risks and uses the technologies in innovative ways.   

GRIMM:          I delivered a presentation for Stratasys, they had some seminars about two years ago that’s talking about direct digital manufacturing, that’s pointing out all of the good things, but told people that my standard line is, “I will be in ugly plaid pants in my lounge chair smoking a cigar,” meaning fully-retired before it ever becomes a reality in a big way, but I turnaround and say, “however, do not sit and rest on that fact as comfort, because your biggest threat is not your current competitors. 

The biggest threat is, like you just said, talking with the inventors, your biggest threat is now, everyone, of any size, has the same abilities as you do, because they don’t have to come up with huge financial assets to buy all the tooling to make a few hundred to get them on the market and take this risk.  Now they can make a few at a time; so, the biggest competitor could be the little small guy, and I honestly think, you’re talking about you’ve got to design something brand new, it’s got to be innovative in every way, that kind of fits the model of the little guy, and I just read an article it was Industry Week or BusinessWeek, or somebody, who said that there is some growth in manufacturing currently, but you can look at the numbers, it’s small companies who are doing traditional manufacturing in the United States. 

If there is any growth at all, or any stability, it’s really from those guys, because a) they’ve got the patriotism; I’m not going to send this offshore or they don’t have the skill set in the people to offshore it, they’re forced to do it here.  So, you look at that, they’re looking for a way to do it; this is a way that could do it; they’re innovators looking to change markets and come up with new products.  You look at that package of things, it really makes sense that they could be the catalyst to make this really really happen.  I’ve talked to dozens of people who have a business idea that’s built on rapid direct-digital manufacturing.  Dozens. 

Whether they will make them come to fruition anytime soon, who knows, but I’m not asking them if I can invest in their companies to give you some idea, but once again I’m conservative, so it could go either way, but there are a lot of people thinking about it and trying to, not build a better mousetrap, they’re trying to come up with a way that you don’t even need a mousetrap to get rid of your infestation problem. 

ROTBART:      To learn more about Todd Grimm, you are welcome to visit his website at TAgrimm.com.  You can also contact him at T.A. Grimm & Associates in Edgewood, Kentucky.  His phone number is (859) 331-5340 or email Todd atTGrimm@TAGrimm.com. 

For US Reliant, I’m Dean Rotbart.  Thank you for listening.