Manufacturing Showcase
By Russ Willcutt
F
or a company that provides maximum agility to its customers in need of high-volume 3D printed parts, 3DEO stands as the perfect example of its own business model. Cofounded in 2016 by three partners who met at the University of Southern California, two of whom were completing graduate studies focusing on binder jetting technology, the original intent was to produce a low-cost 3D printer as an additive manufacturing OEM. Early lessons learned include that prototyping was already well-served, as was low-volume printing. The real niche that needed filling was soon revealed to be high-volume parts production, and the epiphany that customers didn’t really want to buy the printers, they just wanted to purchase parts in the quantities and to the specifications they required. “That’s when our eyes were opened,” according to Matt Sand, co-founder and president. “We realized that creating a low-cost structure to compete with CNC manufacturing involved much more than the 3D printer itself, but everything that happens end-to-end from the introduction of metal powder all the way to the finished part. So we completely rewrote our business
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20 IMD JULY 2020
model from being an OEM to becoming a high-volume producer of 3D parts. We created an industrial platform built around our technology with the goal of being a ‘next-generation factory’.” The benefits of this approach abound. For one thing, having a natively integrated factory allows 3DEO to produce a hypercompetitive cost structure when bidding projects, Sand explains, with negligible startup costs compared to CNC machining and especially injection molded parts. In the latter instance, molds are incredibly expensive, and often take months to complete, and if there are glitches, the extra time and expense piles up. Plus the manufacturer is basically locked into the parameters of the part dictated by that mold. With 3DEO’s technology, there are no molds, and part designs can be created, corrected, and executed in a matter of days, with a ‘go-to-market’ timeframe that has been slashed from years to weeks. In addition, the “closed-loop” nature of 3DEO’s platform results in continuous improvement from which all of its customers benefit, not just the one from which the reasons for the adjustment might’ve originated. By gathering data from all points in the process and feeding it back into the appropriate
