Disruptive is a familiar word to those in additive manufacturing. This technology has been labeled disruptive by many. As it turns out, when other types of disruption arise, you need a disruptive technology to handle it, a technology that can offer a bridge among multiple manufacturing methods to get you through the disruption. Additive manufacturing’s ability to quickly shift and build new objects is exactly what is needed during disruptive times, such as the current pandemic.

Welcome to Technology Forward. The additive industry continues to offer expertise and production capacity for personal protection equipment and other items for healthcare workers. Today I’m here with Rich Garrity, President of the Americas at Stratasys, and we’ll discuss the efforts Stratasys has been taking. So thank you for joining me today, Rich.

Rich Garrity:
Thanks for having me, Leslie.

Leslie:
What’s the involvement of the additive industry during this time? What impact do you think the additive industry’s response will have for the industry? What do you think the response will prove to potential users of additive equipment?

Garrity:
Yeah, I think the silver lining to the COVID-19 pandemic is the role that we’re seeing additive manufacturing play as a final part of today’s supply chain. Especially here in the United States, we’ve seen that supply chains have been optimized for low cost and lean manufacturing. When we face a pandemic like COVID-19 and the disruption that it’s causing, we’re seeing the need and the role and the value that additive manufacturing plays. And we’re engaged with a lot of companies across North America that are starting to think more strategically already about additive manufacturing and the need to have that type of technology onsite locally in order to have better control over their supply chain in the event that we see further rounds of this or further pandemics or other sorts of disruption from a supply chain standpoint in the future.
So I think the industry itself is going to come out of the crisis in a much stronger position on the validity of the applications that it can do from a pure economic business sense, but also in C-level executives minds strategically, how do they start to replan their supply chains over the coming years? And I think additive manufacturing is going to be a big part of that.

Leslie:
Can you go into a few examples or specifics of how you see this effect on the supply chains? Will we be doing less overseas? Will we be doing things closer to shore? Will it matter? What kind of things do you see happening?

Garrity:
I think ultimately we’ll see more and more additive manufacturing located closer to the source of demand, so potentially reshoring more, with part production closer to assembly; being able to simplify assemblies from fewer parts, creating production lines that can be rapidly retooled and supporting dual manufacturing to get up and running fast or handle overflow from traditional manufacturing. I think that the criticality of additive manufacturing here really as a bridge to traditional means in times of disruption from a supply chain standpoint are obviously getting shown now. And I think that companies, particularly in North America, are going to want to have more and more of that capability within their control and locally going forward.

Leslie:
You brought a point up that I don’t think is emphasized enough and that is just how quickly additive manufacturing can be changed over from one object or one design to another. I’ve seen a couple of stories where within a day people have been able to shift whatever it was that they were making.

Garrity:
Yeah, absolutely. And that started of course with face shields very early on that we had our own capacity as Stratasys and we started to also mobilize over a hundred customers in North America and leveraging their capacity as well. Where literally in a matter of a day or a couple of days, we had folks printing these face shields all across North America. And of course, the great part about our industry being a digital process, the designs of these different shields kept getting iterated and improved upon. And so literally from the start of the week to the end of the week, we saw multiple variations in designs that kept getting better and better for functionality. And of course, those were spread out among the customer community and able to be rapidly printed. Now beyond the face shields, we’re seeing a number of other applications emerge over the last couple of weeks as well.

Leslie:
Such as?

Garrity:
We’re seeing various sorts of components for ventilators, whether it’s brackets, housing. We’re seeing manifolds, splitter type applications. We’re seeing some printing ear guards that are going now with the face mask to protect the ears a little bit better. And of course the hands-free door openers, drawer opener, those sorts of applications as well.

Leslie:
Let’s go into collaboration a little bit. Are the capabilities, the functionality of additive helping much more in collaboration among engineering groups?

Garrity:
I think so. The fact again that we’ve got a digital process allows for things to come together real-time and we’re seeing the evidence of that in response to this. And to give it an example of the customer coalition that we formed here in North America, we’ve got over a hundred companies that have deployed our GrabCAD Shop application, which is allowing them in a cloud-based format to be sharing files back and forth, being able to see different levels of available capacity across this network and be able to essentially provide a distributed way of producing PPE parts for COVID-19.

Leslie:
Okay. Now are there any unusual or unrecognized capabilities of additive that are being highlighted now due to addressing the pandemic?

Garrity:
I think the big one is how fast you can turn it on. So the fact that you have a disruption in something that was typically running one way and you can rely on additive manufacturing to be able to bridge you through that disruption. So the speed in which you can implement I think is becoming paramount and also the versatility in terms of the different types of materials that we can do now and different processes. So the level of applications in terms of functionality and real impact applications I think is becoming quite critical and obvious in this COVID-19 time.

Leslie:
Materials I would say would be a key one with a lot of people unsure or uncertain about the materials. So this is giving everybody an opportunity to see just what is available and how it can meet the need?

Garrity:
Yeah, absolutely. And just to speak to that fact on how fast you can implement, we had a hospital in France that actually ordered 60 of our F123 FDM printers and we had the order processed and systems installed and up and running in the hospital in a matter of days.

Garrity:
So they now have that level of capacity for producing those parts onsite.

Leslie:
So what are some of the lessons that maybe you have gleaned or learned over the past couple of weeks?

Garrity:
I think for the industry itself, it’s shown again the level of viability that the industry has in terms of the real-world applications. I think in some cases, if we look back five or six years ago, there was somewhat of a notion around our industry that we were going to be doing all sorts of consumer-related applications and so forth that did not materialize. And in some ways the industry got a little bit of a bad rap for a number of years following that. The reality is the industrial applications for 3D printing and additive manufacturing have continued to move forward.

And this is I think a shining example of what additive manufacturing can do in these times. So we’re going to continue to try to stress those benefits. But from a customer standpoint, also the way that we saw customers come together in a very collaborative manner and across industries and within industries and so forth was great to see. So, one lesson there for us is to continue to try to harness that customer community and spread best practices and better foster that across customers on an ongoing basis. So those are a couple of the key things for us.

Leslie:
Well I thank you very much for your time, Rich. And your information.

Garrity:
Thanks, Leslie.