Like most 8-year olds, I had no idea what my father did back in 1979. Frankly, I don’t think I cared. As long as it meant we could afford a color television to watch Ed Stewart on Crackerjack I was happy.

It wasn’t until I was about nineteen that I mentioned to my father some problems I was having on my college summer placement at Vickers Nuclear Engineering. I was rotating through the departments and had ‘sadly landed’ in the quality control department.  I was baffled. They wanted me to review their newly created ISO9000 documentation to see how it compared to their previous BS5750 documentation. “Yawn”…………………………

Little did I know that my father was both the cause of my problem and the solution!

Back in the mid-1970s, my father was the quality control manager at the Dutch appliance manufacturer Philips (my parents were very lazy naming their children).  The company had a strong quality and safety ethos and co-opted my father onto a British Standards Institute (BSI) working group to develop a standard for manufacturing production procedures. This activity led to the publication of BS5750. My father spent the next few years helping different manufacturing companies adopt and embed BS5750 before transitioning his knowledge across to ISO9000 and ultimately ISO9001.

It took my father about 30-seconds to explain what I needed to do to keep the QA manager at Vickers happy. He then spent the next few hours explaining why standards are vital to the success of companies, supply chains, and industries as a whole.

Fast forward another 30-years, and like good-old dad, I also found myself sitting in a BSI working group. Albeit with a few differences.

In early 2019, I was asked by BSI and their sponsors UK Research & Innovate (UKRI) to write a guide for senior executives and finance professionals to help them understand the business case for investment in Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing. The rationale being that the engineers who understand AM/3DP don’t always know what the budget holders want to hear and struggle to secure investment. Inversely, the budget holders don’t always know what questions to ask or which stones to turn over to find the ‘real cost or ‘risk’ of AM/3DP technology adoption.

In late 2020, after 18-month working with BSI, UKIR, and a group of industry stakeholders, we finally published PAS6001:2020 – Factors to be considered in making and assessing the business case for additive manufacturing and 3D Printing. PAS6001 is a fast-track standardization document, which defines good practice when building or evaluating the business case for AM/3DP investment.

Many readers of TCT might overlook the value of such a document; after all, AM/3DP technology has been around for over 30-years, so surely procurement and implementation is easy.

Not so.

In the 18-years, I have been delivering AM/3DP strategy consultancy; I have seen my fair share of poor technology due diligence and investment trainwrecks. These often stem from business executives’ unrealistic want and needs, who often see AM/3DP as some enabler for ‘manufacturing revolution’. Inversely, many investment errors also come from the magpie-like egos of R&D departments, who see a shiny new toy they need to justify.

About five or 6-years ago, I was asked to run an innovation workshop in a large American heavy machinery company. The idea, or so I thought, was to identify applications where AM/3DP could impact the companies topline revenue or reduce waste and grow bottom-line profitability. However, unbeknown to me, there was a poorly hidden agenda. When I arrived, I was asked if I could tailor the workshop slightly to’ focus on possible applications that would make good use of the machines that had already acquired?’

As it turned out, the companies senior management were ‘so bought into AM/3DP’ they had ‘released’ a $2M budget to engineering and procurement to embed AM/3DP into the business. Doing what good procurement people do, they had negotiated a fantastic price of two large platform metals machines with all the whistles, bells, and ancillary technology. However, it was obvious to the trained eye that the technology was a total mismatch for the business needs.

Inversely, I have also seen this story played out in reverse, where the engineers have identified the most appropriate technology for a given application, only for procurement and management to cut a PO for a ‘more cost-effective platform’. Again, the result is the same, an underutilized machine and a bitter taste all around.

This post was first published in the expert advisory column (Page 34) of TCT Magazine online

Reeves Insight and the British Standards Institute might just have the answer

Like most 8-year olds, I had no idea what my father did back in 1979. Frankly, I don’t think I cared. As long as it meant we could afford a color television to watch Ed Stewart on Crackerjack I was happy.

It wasn’t until I was about nineteen that I mentioned to my father some problems I was having on my college summer placement at Vickers Nuclear Engineering. I was rotating through the departments and had ‘sadly landed’ in the quality control department.  I was baffled. They wanted me to review their newly created ISO9000 documentation to see how it compared to their previous BS5750 documentation.

“Yawn”…………………………

Little did I know that my father was both the cause of my problem and the solution!

Back in the mid-1970s, my father was the quality control manager at the Dutch appliance manufacturer Philips.  The company had a strong quality and safety ethos and co-opted my father onto a British Standards Institute (BSI) working group to develop a standard for manufacturing production procedures. This activity led to the publication of BS5750. My father spent the next few years helping different manufacturing companies adopt and embed BS5750 before transitioning his knowledge across to ISO9000 and ultimately ISO9001.

It took my father about 30-seconds to explain what I needed to do to keep the QA manager at Vickers happy. He then spent the next few hours explaining why standards are vital to the success of companies, supply chains, and industries as a whole.

Fast forward another 30-years, and like good-old dad, I also found myself sitting in a BSI working group. Albeit with a few differences. In 2019, I was asked by BSI and their sponsors UK Research & Innovate (UKRI) if I could write a guide for senior executives and finance professionals to help them understand the business case for investment in Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing. The rationale being that the engineers who understand AM/3DP don’t always know what the budget holders want to hear and struggle to secure investment. Inversely, the budget holders don’t always know what questions to ask or which stones to turn over to find the ‘real-cost’ or ‘risk’ of AM/3DP technology adoption.

So, for the last 18-months, I have been working with BSI, IRUK, and a group of industry stakeholders to develop such a document. I am delighted to say that all our hard work has now come to fruition with the publication of PAS6001:2020 – Factors to be considered in making and assessing the business case for additive manufacturing and 3D printing. PAS6001 is a fast-track standardization document, which defines good practice when building or evaluating the business case for AM/3DP investment.

PAS 6001 starts by looking at the organizational benefits associated with AM/3DP adoption, from topline revenue growth through product innovation to bottom-line profitability through lean manufacturing. The guide then looks at the costs and risks associated with AM/3DP hardware acquisition before considers the potential benefits and drawbacks of establishing an outsourced AM/3DP supply chain. PAS6001 then goes on to assess the impact of AM/3DP on sales channels, commercial activities, tax, tariffs, and intracompany accounting. The final section then considers the human resources and skills needed to implement AM/3DP across the enterprise, from design and manufacture through to quality, sales, and service. The document is supported by several hypothetical case studies and backed with a series of annex tables that readers can populate with information about their businesses. PAS6001 is free for anyone to download from the BSI website.

I am happy with how PAS6001 has turned out, but the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, or in other words, the number of downloads and positive feedback that BSI receives. Perhaps over time PAS6001 will do for AM/3DP what BS5750 did for quality. Make it mainstream.

It has been well over a decade since we first started to see metallic AM processes being used to make medical implants. Initially, these were bespoke implants made by companies such as Xilloc. But more recently we have seen companies such as Stryker, DuPuy, and Zimmer using AM for high volume device production.  From hips and knee joints to cranial plates and spinal fusion cages, all made using medical-grade titanium by laser and electron beam melting.

In more recent years, we have also seen the advent of some medical-grade PEKK materials that can be processed using laser sintering. But beyond that, there is little in the way of ‘truly’ implantable 3D printing polymers, which is a shame as there are so many market opportunities emerging for such materials. That situation may however be about to change because new 3D printable polymers are being developed that can not only be implanted, but they can also be ‘tuned’ in several ways. The mechanical properties can be tuned to simulate different types of tissue. They can also be tuned to degrade over time within the body, slowly being absorbed and replaced by healthy new cells.

Many AM machine vendors and materials companies will claim to have a ‘medical-grade material’ that will be ‘biocompatible’ and tested to ISO-10993. However, on closer inspection, you will find that these materials can only be used in applications with a limited exposure period to human cells.  In other words, there are suitable for functional prototypes, but little else.

Of course, there are 3D Printing systems, such as FDM, which can process biodegradable and bioresorbable materials such as PLA and PLGA. However, these processes fail to achieve the resolution needed for microscale implant manufacture, which is where these materials are typically used. That is because the human body finds it challenging to resorb large amounts of PLA or PLGA without localized swelling and rejection.

So, is there a more viable 3D Printing solution, suited to both small scale micro-device manufacture and larger scale reconstructive implants and scaffolds? Moreover, is there a commercially available material that can be tuned to have a specific rate of degradation in the human body, along with tunable mechanical properties?

Well, I think there might be!

In a bizarre coincidence, in a world of 7.8-billion people, I happen to live in the same small market town as the CEO of newly created 4D Biomaterials. 4D Biomaterials was spun out from the Universities of Birmingham and Warwick here in the UK back in April 2020. The company’s mission is to commercialize a new class of photocurable resins based on polycarbonate chemistry. The resins, developed by the company’s founders Professor Andrew Dove and Dr. Andrew Weems, are novel bioresorbable materials with good shape memory, tuneable mechanical and chemical properties, and promising tissue-healing performance.

Over the last 15-years, I have been asked numerous times by clients if I could identify biocompatible materials with these properties, and until now, I have struggled to find an answer.  Now I think I have one. What is more, I am going to get a little closer to the action on this one, as Phil Smith CEO of 4D Biomaterials, has asked me to become the company’s 3D Printing advisor. It was not a difficult decision to make saying yes.

Images courtesy of 4D Biomaterials

It’s almost 20-years ago that I first saw Additive Layer Manufacturing (ALM) machines being used to make components and parts that were more than just prototypes. They were also more than just casting patterns or short term tooling solutions. They were actual parts, including small electrical connectors and the shells of high-end personalized hearing-aids.

Over the intervening 20-years, we have seen these niche applications slowly growing to encompass high value, low volume applications in sectors such as aerospace and healthcare. But to be honest, AM/3DP is still primarily a niche technology. But why?

The reality is, for an application to work with AM/3DP; it has to be not only technically feasible but also economically viable. And for that to happen, the stars need to align correctly.

The problem is, we don’t always know how or when this alignment will happen. So what can we do to make it happen? Well, we can either wait for the stars to align naturally, or we can start to expand our understanding of physics, or start looking for new branches of astronomy.

In other words, we can wait for existing technology and materials vendors to launch a new product; in the hope, it enables our application. Or, we can develop the technology and materials to suit the applications – from the ground up.

The problem is, very few of the existing AM/3DP machine vendors have the capacity or infrastructure to engage in this special-purpose machine building. Moreover, very few materials vendors have the resources to focus their efforts on targeted materials formulation and characterization. And why should they? They already have R&D roadmaps to concentrate on without the distraction of individual customers wanting bespoke, application-centric technologies, and materials.

So where can companies go to get AM/3DP technologies and materials developed from the ground up?

Since 1994 I have been involved with several senior academics working within one of the world’s leading AM/3DP research groups at the University of Nottingham here in the UK. This group of around 100-people, excel in AM/3DP problem solving, building bespoke demonstration rigs, developing custom software tools, and formulating and characterizing highly specialized materials. From inkjet to open vat photopolymer systems to thermal laser and IR based systems for metals and polymer powers. These guys have developed solutions using no end of new and novel materials, from biological materials to multi-material systems used in optics, electronics, and healthcare. They have developed rapid screening techniques to find new monomers suited to a range of AM/3DP applications and have even developed jetting systems capable of printing metals up to 2000-degrees C.

About 5-years ago, with the blessing of the University, the academics formed the spin-out company  Added Scientific Ltd, to make this capability and capacity accessible to both AM/3DP technology users and machine and materials vendors. What sets ASL apart is that it operates as a truly independent entity from the University, but has access to the university resources, infrastructure, and critically people. This allows ASL to be highly responsive to the technical and commercial needs of companies, without many of the IP ownership or commercial limitations of working solely with a university.

As I have got to know the commercial and technical teams within ASL, rather than just the founders, I have become slightly envious of the work they do.  Solving actual AM/3DP application problems by developing new hardware, materials, and software solutions. As you would imagine, I, therefore, got rather excited to get a call earlier this summer asking me if I would join them on a part-time basis as commercial director.

So here we are, when I was trying to scale back my workload, I now have an additional role in life on top of my consulting portfolio. But that OK, as after 20-years I now think we might have a solution for getting AM/3DP into mainstream manufacturing.

Evolutionary biologists and schoolchildren might still be trying to decide which came first – the chicken or the egg – but in the world of AM/3DP, to me it’s clear. We have to stop trying to shoe-horn applications onto technologies and start developing technologies for applications. If you agree, let me know as I might know some folk who can help.

All Images courtesy of Added Scientific and the University of Nottingham

Contrary to popular belief, one of the first things you learned as a consultant is not how to steal a watch to tell a client the time but now to listen. In consulting, there is a simple ratio; you listen twice as much as you speak. You have two ears and one mouth, and they should be used in those proportions. That’s why I sometimes feel a little uneasy being interviewed by journalists, where I have to do the majority of the talking.

However, just before lock-down started, I spent an enjoyable morning sitting in my meeting room with the writer and journalist Tanya Weaver. I have known Tanya for almost a decade since we first met when she was writing for the magazine Develop3D. Since then Tanya has immersed herself in all things AM/3DP so I knew we were going to have a great chat. Unlike most of the interviews I have done over the years, this was going to be a little different. Not a list of prescribed questions, but a conversation, a conversation about AM/3DP, and my observations over the last 26-years.

During almost 3-hours Tanya and I discussed a broad range of topics that Tanya has how written up into two excellent articles, which have been published on the MTDCNC magazine website.

In the first article, we discuss what I see as the primary barriers for AM/3DP adoption by industry. Primarily centered around production economics and the difficulties of making an application fit the constraints of technology, rather than developing technology for an application (see my September 2020 post for more insight on this topic – as there is a solution).

In the second article, we discuss how companies can find value in the adoption of AM/3DP and whether this should be through top-line revenue growth or bottom-line productivity and efficiency gains. We discuss how new product innovation enabled by AM/3DP can drive sales and revenue. We also look at how AM/3DP can be used to reduce the seven wastes of lean manufacturing and can, therefore, be focused on production efficiency gains, waste reduction, and increased profitability.

I’m not sure if Tanya will be writing any more articles based on our conversation, but if she does, I will post the links below.