Holism and the future of manufacturing
I’ve outlined my vision for the future of manufacturing in my previous article. The future of manufacturing is digital, distributed, on-demand and crucially additive, not subtractive. Putting aside the future for a second and reflecting on the ground reality today, the two primary criticisms that 3D Printing or Additive Manufacturing (AM) gets is its speed and cost. Today, AM is exponentially faster compared to where it was just 5 years ago and according to Merrill Lynch, the speed over the last ten years has been doubling, on an average, every 24 months. This path of progression in the technology’s speed mimics that of Moore’s law. Case closed.
But, the high-costs criticism still stands and rightfully so because the cost of Additive Manufacturing can be eye-watering. Here’s my take on why this criticism although valid, paints only a surface picture of the true potential of Additive Manufacturing.
Holism
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
1 + 1 > 2
The ever-growing bone of contention between reductionism and holism has divided people across many fields from psychology to space. Internet is one of the best examples of holism — the internet behaved differently from the individual parts that go to make it up. What if we apply this holism to the future of manufacturing?
Singularity vs Ecosystem
The problem starts with viewing Additive Manufacturing as a singularity instead of an ecosystem-driver. AM doesn’t just revolutionise the way we make things, but how we design them, how we maintain them, how we scrap them, etc. The greatest aspect of Industry 4.0 is that it is incredibly collaborative in nature and leveraging this great collaborative power of AM and it’s fellow Industry 4.0 technologies to make them act in unison drives up both the economic and environmental advantages for industries to a magnitude beyond what we’ve ever seen before!
Mother Nature is hands down the best engineer out there and ants are a really great example when it comes to holism. Acts come together to act in unison to attain something that otherwise when individually tried would always be unattainable.
fun fact: The second reason why I named my company ‘Antonym’ is because of ants, after getting inspired by their resilience as a holistic organism. The first reason is to be the opposite(antonym) of the status-quo. My friends always get weirded out when I talk on hours on an end about ants, so if interested I can share an entire presentation on why ants are awesome!!
Holistic Cost-cutting
Additive Manufacturing is incredibly expensive on a cost/part basis when you compare it to traditional methods, meaning not a lot of consumer applications are suitable. Today, most end-use applications are mostly in the low-volume high-value applications such as aerospace, defence, tooling, etc. Taking an example of an aerospace turbine blade manufactured using traditional methods VS Additive Manufacturing, it’s clear that AM is 5x expensive. So, why on earth would anyone want to spend 5 times more to produce a part? Here is where the criticism with respect to AM’s cost ends but the story doesn’t end here — infact, it didn’t even start here in the first place. A product’s story doesn’t just start and end with manufacturing — there’s a lot more to a product than what meets the eye.
Manufacturing cost/part VS Lifecycle cost/part
See, when people refer to cost per part, they usually refer to the manufacturing cost/unit and that’s a very narrow way to look at things and a very wrong metric to judge the cost saving potential of Additive Manufacturing. Borrowing the infamous quote from the roller coaster world of crypto, ‘When in doubt, zoom out’. I believe we should focus on the lifecycle cost/part rather than just the cost of manufacturing a part. So, what is this lifecycle that I speak of?
Let’s personify products and just like us humans, let’s divide a product’s lifecycle into three stages — birth, life, & death.
Birth = Design/Engineering & Manufacturing/Assembly
Life = Maintenance, Spares, & Insurance costs
Death = Scrapping or Recycling or Upcycling.
Now when you apply this metric, the lifecycle cost/part of an additive manufactured part is 12% lesser compared to traditional methods.
So Yes, today to manufacture a part with Additive Manufacturing can be expensive but can saves the organisation/consumers money constantly along the part’s lifetime. Apart from the above mentioned cost-savings, there are other avenues to save more money with Additive Manufacturing. In Europe, the carbon tax is about £25/tonne and that would equate to about £5 in cost savings for every 1kg of additive manufactured parts. When you compound this £5 savings over a mid to high volume, the savings are huge.
Holistic sustainability
This holistic cost-cutting approach applies to sustainability as well. On top of Additive Manufacturing which is already much more sustainable with its inherent material wastes & CO2 savings, factoring in holistic birth/life/death carbon/wastes savings, the net result is radical, to say the least!
Today, 3D Printing or Additive Manufacturing is doing what e-commerce did to retail. The incentives to switch to a fully digital manufacturing and supply chains are immense and with the AM industry expected to grow 29% annually to reach £45bn by 2026(Mordor Intelligence), industries must pivot or get left behind to play catch-up.
“The best way to predict the future is to create it” — Abraham Lincoln
Rev 🚀
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