AM Innovation from Within: Why a Transformation in Your Process Can Be More Powerful than Changing Your Product

1. Durability, flexibility, strength: process innovation

Agility combined with resilience is a powerful competitive advantage in your production process. Consumers may want more product diversity, or there could be a sudden shift in demand for a specific product type that a manufacturing business may want to respond to.

But complex, custom, and proven production lines are not agile by nature. Traditionally, changing course in a vast, interconnected manufacturing set-up is almost automatically costly.

AM changes that - both in terms of what's possible and what's economical. With AM, you can more easily adapt tools to switch between products or make on-the-fly tweaks to products while still manufacturing on the same line.

On top of that, sustainability goals and commercial benefits are converging today. Reducing waste and energy use isn't just more sustainable; it also makes business sense. Stripping unsustainable materials and waste from a process can become a selling point to consumers.

So how can AM help with all that?

First, it can enable you to make changes quickly and reduce the cost and disruption of a changing playing field. If new regulations emerge, you can use AM to quickly adapt a production line - for example, to make the same thing out of a new material (say, paper pulp instead of plastics), or to make a new, more accurate type of filter that enables compliance with stricter standards (whether that's for wastewater or filters installed on production equipment).

De-risking production continuously is also something that can be more easily achieved with AM. For example, you could use AM to design more flexible or more fitted grippers and brackets that can handle delicate products to avoid breakage; you can improve the accuracy of tools and fixtures to minimize scrap; you can evolve the design of production line tools that were prone to failure, thereby reducing tool waste as well as avoiding idling lines and equipment; and you can reduce tooling costs for small series to avoid overproduction, which is especially true for molding.