Listen as Greg Thompson of Protolabs discusses how service bureaus are helping in the battle against the Coronavirus with their ability to offer a range of prototyping and manufacturing capabilities.

Welcome to Technology Forward. In addition to additive vendors’ efforts to help healthcare workers, service providers are also doing their part. Today, I’m here with Greg Thompson, global product manager at Protolabs and we’ll discuss how service providers who offer a range of prototyping and manufacturing capabilities are helping to supply healthcare workers with the equipment they need. So thank you for joining me today, Greg.

 

 

 

Thompson:
Thanks Leslie for the welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Leslie:
First question, where do service providers such as yourself, fit in with all of the efforts to supply healthcare workers with the equipment that they need?

Thompson:
I think our role is to ultimately offer parts and solutions. As you mentioned, at Protolabs we’re technology agnostic. Our goal is to support our customers with the right technology for their needs. So we have not only injection molding and CNC machining and sheet metal fabrication, but we also have 3D printing for additive manufacturing. And ultimately, what the customers need is our capabilities and breadth of capabilities at scale. And the quality that we offer to support these very critical and urgent needs. And I think that’s really what we provide and why our customers come to us for help.

Leslie:
Now, given all that’s happening with this crisis, what impact do you think it is having and the industry’s ability to respond? What do you think this is having on the more additive side of the industry?

Thompson:
To start, I want to applaud everyone in the additive industry for their response. It’s clearly a group of really passionate people, ready to mobilize, ready to help. And we’ve seen the entrepreneurial spirit of additive on display. And I think it’s so great and so admirable to see. I think the impact that additive’s response to this crisis will really have, I think it reminds everyone of the real power of additive. And it brought it into the forefront of the conversation as a production solution. And I think there’s a real opportunity now as folks have leveraged additive and seen it being successful. There was a point in time where we have the chance to move additive from where it’s historically lived in prototyping and bring it to where the industry has been hoping to go. And that’s into production. And so I think moving forward from here, there’s a real chance to do that.

Leslie:
So do you think that what people have seen that this is going to persuade potential users to look more closely into this and potentially even adopt this technology more often?

Thompson:
I think so. I think we’ve learned a lot about the flexibility of our global supply chain as a whole and its ability to adapt unanticipated disruptions, certainly from this crisis, and its ability to escalate production quickly, right? Which is what we needed, right? For critical applications like test kits and like ventilators and like personal protective equipment. And so what happened was, everyone really took a fresh view as to how anything that they needed could get made and customers were wide open to any technology solution.

And so we saw many of our customers come to us and ask for quotes across our services. They were open to evaluating their parts across any service that would help them find the best option for their need, their part and their timetable. And so that included really high volume quotes for 3D printing, and additive was the right choice and successfully filled many of those applications. And so as we look forward, folks are going to really rethink what their supply chains will be and which manufacturing solutions they’ll use.

And so I think this will create a new openness as we rebuild the supply chain to be broad, to be flexible, to be responsive. I think it will continue the conversation about what the possibilities are across all the different manufacturing technologies. And that’s going to benefit all of us, but especially additive. Because I think more and more companies are going to consider it and come to consider it as a really viable option for production.

Leslie:
So any other effects that you might see on the supply chain or just the fact that it’s now giving people a chance to examine that more closely, that they might be making good choices.

Thompson:
I really think it’s that. I think it’s because in this time of crisis folks opened up their consideration set to any manufacturing technology available. And that it really got people thinking differently about how they could manufacture parts, and which solutions would work best. And so in doing so we saw additive be used for applications that maybe we wouldn’t have, or that people weren’t considering for in previous times.

Leslie:
Have you noticed, or what do you see as far as maybe some of the unrecognized capabilities of additive that the efforts to fight this pandemic are starting to showcase?

Thompson:
Yeah, I think what additive brought to the fight against COVID was twofold. And I’m not sure they’re totally new. They’re what we in the industry kind of knew to be true. But I think they’re on display now for many folks to see. And what it really brought was the fast delivery of initial parts and the capability to produce complex or customized parts. So it takes time for molds to be prepared and additive supplied a lot of those early parts critical to the fast response that we needed globally. And we saw a lot of new designs get developed, either to say expand the availability of ventilators or critical equipment. And so some of these new and unique designs were, they’re complex, they’re challenging to mold. Things like nasal swabs or valves that expand the number of patients that could use a single ventilator.

And so those were the parts that really I think additive were able to support with. So we at Protolabs on, within our additive business, we’ve worked with a company called Ventech on ventilator parts, those were challenging parts. In Europe we worked with a company called Isinnova that converted scuba masks into ventilators. We worked with a company called Luminex on parts for test kits. And we got all of these stories on our website at our COVID response page. But you know, ultimately again, I think it’s those early parts and those really complex or challenging parts that additive supported that really augments and works well along with kind of traditional manufacturing.

Leslie:
It sounds like in this case additive was kind of a bridge as far as making something quickly, versus making something that you would have to injection mold. Additive kind of served that go-between for some of that?

Thompson:
Yeah, in many cases it did. And I think if you think about what’s really great about additive, not only does it allow for really complex parts, but your initial production of parts can come relatively quickly. What’s great about molding and machining is they’re just really fantastic and repeatable at scale. So again, often additive can work for that bridge solution, or the final solution if the part count is lower or the design is necessarily complex, either for performance or to optimize design. So that’s really the types of things that I, as I stand back and look at the role that additive has played in the COVID fight that it’s done really well with.

Leslie:
What are some of the lessons that has been learned over the past few weeks?

Thompson:
I think many. For me probably two stand out. And I think we’ve talked about it here in our conversation, but so in terms of how goods get made, I think it reinforced kind of what we in the industry knew, that’s a great way to augment traditional manufacturing. And additive has worked really well alongside molding, alongside machining and sheet metal. None replace each other. They all make sense for the right parts. And so we talked that the high volume requirements, or ultimately they’re better suited for injection molding and machining. And additive’s role is ideal for parts that take advantage of the technology is really key benefit, time to part design, complexity and customization.

I think we at Protolabs, we’re in a fortunate position, right? We can help our supply chain customers determine which of those manufacturing paths make the most sense based on their goals, their time to ramp and they have a choice across all of our services. And I think the second big lesson for me is that collaborations really work. We’ve seen hospitals in industry, regulatory bodies, universities and manufacturers all collaborate together to fight this pandemic. And we would not have seen the response that we’ve had without all those different areas of expertise coming together. And so I think as we move forward into the future, not only is there going to be an openness to consider a range of technology solutions to make parts and create products. But I also think there’s going to be an openness to working together and building on each other’s strengths. And I think that’s a great model that we can learn from and build on.

Leslie:
Yeah, that sounds excellent. Another quick question that came to mind. Most of these products that I’ve seen in the additive community, they’re primarily made out of plastics. Are you seeing anything involved involving metals?

Thompson:
Yeah, I think in this case most of the needs in the market were kind of smaller, higher scale plastic components. And I think that this kind of fits with the urgent need of COVID. There is certainly a role for metal applications within additive for production solutions. And we’ve seen not only the medical community and aerospace and even automotive use those applications. And so I still think that the lessons that we’ve seen in COVID, those required a lot of plastic parts. They still apply in metals. Complex designs, managing heat exchange or fluid flow, removing steps of labor. And assembly by printing what used to be multiple components into one, all of those really still hold true. And we’ve seen many, many examples of metal additive successes in production in the past. They just weren’t quite on display in this particular need in this particular crisis.

Leslie:
it was more about speed and about not much else.

Thompson:
I mean it was really about speed and creativity, and again, I think it was not only like those bridge parts that we talked about, but and then transitioning into scale. And I can tell you, we’ve seen that work exceptionally well at Protolabs. We’ve printed COVID parts across all four of our services. So I think that to me is that big lesson learned, right? That boy, there’s a lot of choices, and no one way that any particular part needs to be made. And so I think engineers and supply chain professionals are really going to take that to heart and rethink how they design and how they procure goods.

Leslie:
Well those are my questions, Greg, and I thank you very much for your time and your information and expertise on this subject. I really appreciate it.
Thompson:

All right, well thank you Leslie. It’s been an absolute pleasure and I appreciate your time and all your readers and we look forward to seeing where additive can go.