3D Printing is on the rise. Even President Obama in his State of the Union address referred to 3D printing as having "the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything". So what is it exactly? Contrary to traditional manufacturing, which is subtractive, 3D manufacturing is additive. As an example, if I want a wooden cube, traditional, subtractive manufacturing would take a piece of timber, cut a cube with the right size, and dispose all excess material. In contrast, additive manufacturing would gradually "print" the cube, one slice at a time, with no waste. With 3D printing, it appears that the sky is the limit in terms of product innovation.
In 1986, Ramchandran Jaikumar wrote a seminal article in Harvard Business Review, entitled Postindustrial Manufacturing, on how the emergence of Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) would change the rules of competition. So, "what's the point?", you would tell me. "We are in the 21st century, Japan is no longer at the cutting edge of manufacturing, and we are talking about 3D printing, not FMS."
Bear with me. We can learn a lot from history. Comparing implementations of FMS in Japan and in the United States, Jaikumar observed that one-third of the systems implemented in Japan were completely untended, whereas none were left untended in the U.S. That is, the systems in Japan were fully automated, with no engineer controlling the production process.
What does it take to leave a system completely untended? It requires a lot of knowledge about the process. These flexible manufacturing systems are awfully complicated. And they produce a wide variety of products (e.g., an average of 93 parts per system in Japan, out of which 22 are new every year) in small volumes (258 units per year per part on average in Japan), so it's not as if you faced a completely stable environment, in which the only effort would be to switch on and off a machine. To the contrary. Leaving such a system untended requires a lot of process knowledge, planning for every contingency, making sure that the materials arrive in the right quantity at the right time, that the machine has been programmed to cut exactly up to specifications, etc.
Why would you leave a system untended? Wouldn't it be simpler to hire a few engineers to make sure that the flow is smooth and to act in case of a problem? In theory, yes. In reality, however, those Japanese companies had invested so much effort in trying to understand the process that they had developed a complete mastery of the technology. No detail had been left out. Every contingency had been planned for. As a result of that technological knowledge, the systems in Japan were used in a fundamentally different way than those implemented in the United States. They were developed in a shorter time, achieved higher utilization, were used for a greater product variety in smaller volumes, and introduced many new products every year.
With such a mastery of technology and such a deep knowledge of the process, the top management could divert its attention away from the day-to-day, "below the line" operations putting out fires, and managing physical assets, to focus on long-term, "above the line" projects building technological and process competence, and developing intellectual assets.
Back to 3D printers. The promise is that one may simply push a button and print whatever we like. A mechanical part. A dental implant. A toy. A violin. How are we going to use those 3D printers? Are we going to use them to replace current machines, geared to make a few products in large volumes, akin to the U.S. implementations of FMS reported by Jaikumar? Or instead, are we going to use them to introduce a wide variety of new products like the Japanese implementations of FMS?
If it is the latter as the business press seems to promise, then the lesson learned from the implementation of FMS may turn out to be useful. We should perhaps first develop technological competence. Develop mastery of the process. Not everybody would be able to manage above the line. There would be no room for operational mediocrity. The real locus of competition would be on ideas, not on manufacturing them. Above the line, not below. But in order to get there, process competence is required.
Some pundits in the Silicon Valley have complained about the lack of innovation in these last decades compared to the first half of the 20th century. How could that be possible after the Information Technology revolution and now the 3D printing revolution? The technology appears to be there, so why aren't we using to its full potential? In the market for ideas, there are often a few winners and many laggards. Technological competence and process expertise cannot be improvised. These will be the ultimate differentiators.
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