How will 3D printing disrupt manufacturing?

Hard to believe that digitalisation might affect manufacturing to the same extent it has affected and changed media. Record shops did not survive the digital reproduction of music: The last Virgin Megastore in the US closed six years ago, following the earlier demise of many thousands of smaller retailers. Newspapers have also had to rethink their content and delivery systems—The Economist now delivers summarised daily news directly to smartphones. What if 3D printing, also called “additive manufacturing”, went mainstream and allowed each of us to reproduce tangible goods remotely?

Conventional models of production rely on large, interlinked manufacturing facilities and the vast complex of supply and delivery relations that revolve around them.

Digitalisation has the potential to disrupt this system. It is already disrupting business-as-usual in certain niche industries, prosthetics and medical implants among them, because 3D printing makes customisation easier and design processes faster. MIT’s Hugh Herr prints plastic prosthetic sockets that once were made almost artisanally. Now, the part comes out already perfectly adjusted to individual requirements. If not, it can be remodelled and reprinted in no time. “Rigorous quantitative processes of developing unique elements of a prosthesis reduce discomfort of the patients and drive down the price,” he explains.

For standardised items, the cost advantage of additive manufacturing may be less significant since the technology does not yet allow high-volume production; except perhaps for photosensitive resins, which can now be printed 25x times faster thanks to a new process that uses a combination of lasers and oxygen to grow objects instead of printing them layer by layer. In the meantime, 3D printing can help reduce tooling costs by up to 30% because the piece can be printed in its final form rather than carved from a larger piece of material—saving time and reducing waste. Marco Annunziata, GE’s chief economist, agrees: “We project that by 2020 over 100,000 parts will be additively manufactured by GE Aviation, which could reduce the weight of a single aircraft by 1,000 pounds, resulting in reduced fuel consumption.”

One of the future scenarios imagined in an Industrial Research Institute study was the collapse of mass manufacturing under the strain of 3D printing. 3D printing could also reduce the entry costs into markets, allowing niche businesses to spring up closer to points of consumption. Over time, the source of competitive advantage would shift towards areas of the value chain such as design or even the ownership of customer networks. In such a situation, economies reliant on scale manufacturing at low cost would stand to lose the most.

Chris Caplice, MIT’s executive director of the Center for Transportation and Logistics, believes that 3D printing fits into the general trend of decentralisation of manufacturing and scale reduction, joining robotics, automation and other technologies. But the real impacts, he told Look ahead, can be discerned only in a long-term perspective.

Logistically, the technology could also change the distribution and the nature of goods being transported. In a 3D printing-dominated world, more raw materials for 3D printers than end products would be transported, often pushed towards decentralised areas of production. This, in turn, would result in fewer long hauls, thus lowering volumes of cargo that would be coming in through ports.

The changes, Mr Caplice concludes, will take decades. “We will have driverless cars way before we have that level of sophistication.”

This post first appeared on GE LookAhead. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Julia Taranova writes for GE Look Ahead

Image: A figurine is printed by Aurora’s 3D printer F1 during the 2014 Computex exhibition at the TWTC Nangang exhibition hall in Taipei. REUTERS/Pichi Chuang.