How Fast Radius Retains Its Competitive Edge in the World of Manufacturing

By becoming a publicly listed company, Fast Radius stands to better leverage Industry 4.0 technologies.

Fast Radius has more than 2,000 customers, including many Fortune 500 companies in the aerospace, automotive, medical, and industrial sectors. (Image courtesy of Fast Radius.)

Fast Radius has more than 2,000 customers, including many Fortune 500 companies in the aerospace, automotive, medical, and industrial sectors. (Image courtesy of Fast Radius.)

Established in 2017, Fast Radius has carved a name for itself as a multi-faceted digital manufacturing company that has paved the way for innovations in a variety of industries. Its proprietary Cloud Manufacturing Platform helps clients orchestrate all stages of the manufacturing lifecycle via cloud-based applications. Whether it’s additive manufacturing, CNC machining, urethane casting or injection molding, Fast Radius offers scalable cloud manufacturing and digital supply chain solutions in prototyping and mass production.

In efforts to continue its growth and cement its position in the world of manufacturing, Fast Radius recently entered into a partnership with ECP Environmental Growth Opportunities Corp that will transform the former into a publicly listed company.

“The Fast Radius Cloud Manufacturing Platform provides a fundamentally more sustainable way to produce and fulfill parts around the world,” said ECP Environmental Growth Opportunities chairman, Doug Kimmelman. “We look forward to partnering with [Fast Radius] to accelerate growth as they execute on their proven business model and capitalize on the significant opportunities in the growing custom parts manufacturing market. As a public company, we believe that Fast Radius will be even better positioned to maintain its leadership in the software and industrial technology industry.”

A Holistic Manufacturing Solution

At its core, Fast Radius’ Cloud Manufacturing Platform is an end-to-end solution that bridges a vast network of company-owned micro-factories and third-party suppliers around the world, using a cloud-based suite of design software and manufacturing applications. By integrating design and production with a digital infrastructure, the software manages and streamlines the manufacturing lifecycle, from concept and design to production. The Cloud Manufacturing Platform allows clients to optimize their designs and gain feedback, order custom parts online, create digital twins of specific products to be stored digitally, print parts for prototyping or mass production, and much more.

Typically, the first step of the process is for the client to contact Fast Radius to express their desire in producing a part, be it for prototyping or mass production. The client will provide as much detail as they can about the part, including design specifications and function. The second step involves the client receiving a quote from Fast Radius, along with detailed feedback highlighting any flaws in the design.

“Often in conjunction with [step one], is the feedback on that design,” explained John Nanry, Chief Manufacturing Officer at Fast Radius. “We have also automated a lot of the design-for-manufacturability feedback so that we can deliver back to our customer an entire insights package around, ‘Here’s how much it’s going to cost, and here are the areas that are at risk for your design,’ or, ‘Here are the areas that won’t be manufacturable.’ What would take an engineer two to three hours to do, our systems can do it, and the engineer can spend 10 minutes reading it through and doing a double-check. And then, we can get back to the customer much more quickly.”

Following steps one and two, the client can choose how to proceed with production, be it at a Fast Radius micro-factory or a third-party manufacturer. Regardless of which route they take, the product will be created locally—reducing transportation costs, curtailing material waste, and accelerating the design-to-delivery lifecycle for the client.

Through Fast Radius’s Cloud Manufacturing Platform, customers from a diverse collection of industries have been able to create over 11 million custom parts. (Image courtesy of Fast Radius.)

Through Fast Radius’s Cloud Manufacturing Platform, customers from a diverse collection of industries have been able to create over 11 million custom parts. (Image courtesy of Fast Radius.)

Cloud-Based Apps Manage End-to-End Manufacturing Processes

Like most other forms of cloud computing, the appeal of the Cloud Manufacturing Platform is its suite of various apps and services that cater to the unique demands and challenges of the manufacturing industry. As of now, the platform features four applications.

The first application is the Virtual Warehouse, which is geared towards converting a customer’s products from a brick-and-mortar warehouse to a virtual warehouse (i.e., cloud). Put simply, Virtual Warehouse stores all information pertinent to producing a product—the geometries of its parts, how they’re put together, the materials used, the production methods employed—so that it can be produced when needed and at the right quantities. This way, customers not only circumvent warehouse storage expenses, but ensure standardized, on-demand part production. Moreover, these parts can be produced when needed, thereby omitting any transportation costs, wait times and other delays. Virtual Warehouse also ensures a flexible, readily available supply chain that is better equipped to deal with today’s ever-shifting market.

In a single year, as much as $1.5 trillion has been spent on shipping costs alone. (Image courtesy of Fast Radius.)

In a single year, as much as $1.5 trillion has been spent on shipping costs alone. (Image courtesy of Fast Radius.)

The second application is called Additive Launch. This app pairs customers looking to create new products with the latest additive manufacturing design tools and technologies. Such pairings help customers not only produce the parts, but allow them to test and revise their designs using the most suitable materials. For example, recently, Fast Radius collaborated with Rawlings to create a new baseball glove that incorporated lattices to augment performance. Rawlings had been searching for a scalable, customizable option for making gloves, and through their involvement with Fast Radius were able to use Carbon’s advanced additive manufacturing technologies to produce the gloves commercially.

The third application is called On-Demand Manufacturing, where Fast Radius will partner with customers through every step of the manufacturing process, from design to production. This ensures design feedback expediency and efficiency in production. 

Finally, the fourth application is an extension of On-Demand Manufacturing, known as At-Scale Production. Here, Fast Radius produces the parts at their dedicated micro-factories or through their curated network of third-party suppliers. It also helps customers in standardizing the part so that it can be mass-produced if needed.

“We believe that cloud manufacturing has the potential to be as impactful to making parts and physical goods as cloud computing has been to making digital goods and software,” Nanry said. “By integrating the discovery and design and manufacturing of parts into a single platform, we can use that to generate insights that previously would have been more siloed. And then, we can deliver that to ultimately reduce time-to-market.”

The Future of Industry 4.0

As Fast Radius’ Chief Manufacturing Officer, a major aspect of Nanry’s job is to scrutinize the ongoing trends in the world of Industry 4.0—and he believes that only companies that adopt these new technologies will be able to thrive. For him, four key areas in the manufacturing landscape will experience a paradigm shift due to Industry 4.0:

  • Storage and inventory: As already discussed, with the rise of virtual warehouses and digital twins, companies are no longer bound by draconian concepts like expensive, large-scale warehouses full of parts that may remain shelved for long periods.
  • Logistics: With on-demand manufacturing, digital warehouses and micro-factories becoming prevalent, Industry 4.0 is reshaping the supply chain to become more local than global. This allows companies to circumvent exorbitant transportation and storage costs.
  • AI and Design: With machine learning and AI ensconcing themselves in the world of manufacturing, Nanry believes that they are going to become a standard tool in any engineer’s repertoire. With the advent of generative design, advanced design software and AI-assisted design tools, engineers will be able to optimize, troubleshoot, revise, simulate and demo their parts at much faster rates.

Lastly, Nanry believes that underlying much of the change driving the manufacturing landscape is a need to streamline supply chains and make them more flexible.

“I think we’re going to see a big push for more simplicity in supply chains and truly acknowledging what the risks are,” said Nanry. “Supply chain risk is difficult to qualify or quantify, and therefore it’s difficult to build a business case around it. So, of course, you’re going to drive to these rigid long supply chains that have low piece-per-costs. But what the past year has shown us, is that supply chain agility and flexibility and simplicity really matter. So, I believe that Industry 4.0—if we think of it as products going from factories through supply chains and delivery—I think all of those technologies will enable supply chains to get simpler.”

“The benefits from the software and hardware powering cloud manufacturing are tangible and significant—the cloud brings improved speed, flexibility, cost, and accessibility to Industry 4.0, all while providing a more sustainable model for global supply chains,” said Lou Rasssey, CEO and co-founder of Fast Radius.

As a competitive player on the bleeding edge of technology, Fast Radius aims to become the world’s premiere $100 billion cloud manufacturing and digital supply chain company. Aside from being a trusted supplier for many Fortune 500 companies, Fast Radius has also been recognized by the World Economic Forum as having some of the most advanced factories in the world. As such, by 2025, it is estimated that the company’s revenue will be as high as $635 million—more than 25 times their estimated revenue this year ($25 million).

To learn more, visit the Fast Radius website.