(no subject)

From: Marshall Burns (Ennex  Corporation)
To: Ian Gibson (University of Hong Kong), RP-ML
Date: Saturday, February 25, 1995
Ian Gibson wrote on 1995 02 20:
> 1. Cost (obviously) - thanks to some of the manufacturers for 
> addressing this point already - lets see those prices come rolling down.

     I disagree. How can a machine capable of generating a 3-D solid object directly from computer data be overpriced at anything less than a million dollars? Look at the productivity gains that manufacturers using these machines are realizing. Vern Schmidt at Chrysler and others in the industry have reported these machines paying for themselves in less than a year. Ford has a case study of saving about $10 million in one 64-hour run. Smaller companies that can't afford to own a machine can have a model run by a job shop from a CAD file for a few thousand dollars. For their value, these machines are cheap. The challenge, as in any sales situation, is to communicate this value to the customer. It's not easy. As you point out Ian, the customers are getting a lot of information from a lot of directions; it is certainly difficult for them to sort it all out. We have to make the information available, and be patient while it sinks in.
     Don't get me wrong. Prices of fabricators will come down over the years, and as they do the growth of our industry will mushroom. But the point I am making is that we don't have to wait for these low-priced machines to have economical autofab; we have it now! Another important point is that if we put too much pressure on the vendors to lower their prices, then we are not going to get the levels of R&D that we need in order to see ongoing breakthroughs in the hardware, and it will be difficult for the vendors to provide the levels of customer support that we need in order to have a happy industry.
     By the way, Ian, you point out that Hong Kong already has more fabricators per capita than the UK, and that they are all in university and government sites. Are these sites doing their jobs of making the processes available to industry to try out? Let's not make the mistake of overloading your country with more machines than it knows how to profit from right away. If you offer industry the opportunity to get its feet wet by making profitable use of the machines that are already there, they will learn the advantages of owning their own machines.

> 3. System selection - 
> I would like to run an extensive 
> case-study based project (call it a benchmark if you wish but I think it is 
> a bit more than that). This would take the form of testing a range of CAD 
> systems against a range of RP systems for a range of industry sectors. 

     Very important. We need to understand better, from independent sources, about the quality of fabricator input the various CAD systems are generating.