New Industry 4.0 Campus Opens on Chicago’s Goose Island

Fast Radius supplies details about its new Goose Island facility and its role in the 4th Industrial Revolution.

In 1968, General Motors launched a new era in manufacturing when the company distributed its “Standard Machine Controller” specification to vendors for a quote. The competition resulted in the development of the first programmable logic controller (PLC) and thrust North American manufacturing into the digital age.

The next three decades witnessed an innovation explosion. During that time, imagination, initiative and the ability to work outside of your comfort zone were the greatest assets a designer could possess. The pace at which technology was advancing was so quick that experience beyond a few years appeared to be of little value. It seemed as though nothing that you were working on today would still be relevant a year from now.

The PLC introduced computer technology to the factory floor and revolutionized how we make things. Industry 4.0 is not only changing the way we design, make and move things, but also allowing anyone with a browser to access manufacturing knowledge and capacity formerly reserved only for large corporations.

The microfactory concept allows entrepreneurs to make what they need when and where they need it. (Image courtesy of Fast Radius.)

The microfactory concept allows entrepreneurs to make what they need when and where they need it. (Image courtesy of Fast Radius.)

In 2018, Fast Radius was named one of the nine best factories globally by the World Economic Forum (WEF) after the company established its first microfactory in Chicago. Fast Radius’s vision would create a network of “factories in a box,” all operating under a cloud-driven software umbrella that would change the way we look at supply chains.

With traditional manufacturing, parts are mass-produced at large facilities and shipped over land, sea or air to wherever they are needed. The Fast Radius manufacturing model allows entrepreneurs to transmit digital copies of what they need, when and where they need it, and to produce the parts in whatever quantity they require.

The 4th Industrial Revolution has arrived to take on the challenges created by outmoded 20th-century business practices. In the following Q&A session, Fast Radius talks about its new Goose Island facility and its role in the 4th Industrial Revolution.

Could you provide specific details about the new Goose Island campus? What is its physical size? How many employees work at the facility?

Our Goose Island campus is ~50,000 square feet—located at 1224 N Hooker St, Chicago, IL 60642—and will house multiple microfactories. We currently have CNC manufacturing technology in place at this location, and we are building out additive capabilities.
We don’t recognize headcount by location—we share many resources across our micro-factories in Chicago. We can tell you that we closed 2021 with 328 full-time employees (180% YoY growth); 74 percent of those employees are in IL.

Are there any plans to expand current capabilities to include more equipment or additional technologies?

At our Goose Island location, right now we are primarily focused on CNC and additive technologies. Across our entire network, we offer other manufacturing technologies and will continue to evolve and expand our capabilities within our Cloud Manufacturing Platform.

What local industries are being served?

We now have multiple microfactories in Chicago—with locations in the West Loop and Goose Island neighborhoods—along with a microfactory at UPS’ Worldport headquarters in Kentucky.

Our local microfactories produce component parts for companies across industries, including traditional automotive, electric vehicles, medical and health care devices, and consumer goods, to name a few. Our microfactories will continue to expand around the world, enabling customers across industries to ship parts digitally and produce goods locally where and when they are needed, dramatically reducing waste and improving access.

Describe Fast Radius’s growth over the years.

Our roots are in additive technology, but since our inception, we’ve realized the power of bringing a suite of manufacturing solutions to market that meets an array of needs across sectors. Just in the last two years, we’ve introduced and expanded our Cloud Manufacturing Platform, which offers customers software tools and access to our state-of-the-art microfactories, all of which help them to optimize manufacturing costs, reduce their carbon footprint, and better manage their supply chain. Our platform provides an end-to-end solution for manufacturers to more efficiently and sustainably design, make and move products.

Today, we’re focused on continuing to build out our platform and create features and functionality in our software that allows our customers to more sustainably and flexibly make parts from anywhere in the world.

Discuss how Fast Radius can eliminate just-in-time heartaches by providing the ability to store parts digitally.

We recently conducted a survey of engineers—industrial and product designers, and procurement professionals—about their pain points with custom manufacturing and discovered that nearly half of the companies that have relied on just-in-time (JIT) over the past several years are now moving away from it—likely due to supply chain uncertainty and disruption. Regardless of the reason, people are pivoting away from JIT, and cloud manufacturing—like our Cloud Manufacturing Platform—is being viewed as the solution, no matter which side you fall to, as it provides more reliability, resilience and flexibility.

This platform leverages multiple technologies to unite all stages of the manufacturing lifecycle within a common digital infrastructure, creating a flexible platform with the potential for global scale. Cloud manufacturing enables a number of powerful technologies and second-order effects and ultimately offers the efficiency and speed of JIT manufacturing with improved reliability, resiliency and flexibility.

What is Fast Radius’ potential in Industry 4.0? How is Fast Radius different from others in its approach to Industry 4.0?

We’ve seen in the digital age over the last 20 years how cloud computing has democratized access to compute power and has allowed anyone with a laptop or a browser to create in the digital space and build on things like AWS [Amazon Web Services] and infrastructure that digital creators have benefitted from. Now in Industry 4.0, we can create similar opportunities for anyone with a browser to get access to manufacturing knowledge and manufacturing capacity to make the things they want, and that is really exciting.

We differentiate ourselves through our speed to market, flexibility and quality. Our parts are certified, meaning they aren’t just prototypes but they are actually out in the world on end products.

Additionally, whereas other companies are focused on additive technologies, we are technology agnostic. Our customers receive design and manufacturing insights (via our software), then we provide a recommendation as to which manufacturing technology and materials will yield the best quality in their given quantities. Our customers find our insight software to be a huge benefit and the fact that we are codifying knowledge makes it accessible to them. We provide aggregate information at their fingertips.