Stereolithography Marketability

From: Marshall Burns (Ennex  Corporation)
To: Gerard Furbershaw (Lunar Design  Incorporated)
Cc: RP-ML, John Diebold (The JD Consulting  Group, Inc.), Anthony Dertouzos (Alnitak  Corp.)
Date: Wednesday, April 19, 1995
Subject: Stereolithography Marketability
Dear Gerard,
     Your comment about the contrast between companies that are scrapping their SLAs and others that are multiplying their installations is an important one.
     The fabricator industry today is comparable to where the computer industry was in the 1960s. In 1959, John Diebold wrote a beautiful little book called "Automation: Its Impact on Business and Labor." Along with stories of dramatic improvements in productivity, he included some war stories with disastrous endings, with millions of dollars and years of effort down the drain in some cases. He reported that "good applications seem to be the exception rather than the rule," and concluded that "many of the failures have been due to excessive enchantment with the hardware of automation, and insufficient attention to the management and operating concepts." In Diebold's analysis, automation was "a way of thinking as much as a way of doing. It is a new way of organizing and analyzing production."
     Although Diebold was writing about mainframe computers and punch-tape NC mills, his lessons are very apropos to today's automated fabricators. Of the job shops that you ask about in your message, the ones that are doing well and now operate as many as a half-dozen or more machines are delivering a new style of manufacturing to their customers. The ones that have failed have simply installed a machine and tried to sell its output. The new style of manufacturing involves rapid production of individually designed items, often including a series of iterations that allow the customer to play "what-if" with design variations. This is only one element of the new direction that manufacturing is taking. I will be speaking more about this and other elements of "co-constructive" manufacturing in my presentation at the Stuttgart conference next month. (An article based on the talk will appear later for those who cannot make it to the conference.)
     Just as with mainframe computers in the 60s and personal computers in the 80s, fabricators can bring tremendous improvements in productivity and creativity. And they can just as well be a tremendous waste of money and effort. The difference is in "changing your thinking as much as your doing," and understanding how that new tool you just bought has transformed just exactly what it is you do for a living.