Marshal and others,
Unless there is a change in the equipment that makes it more affordable,
more accurate, more repeatable, have better tolerance.... Then the thought
of using these technologies for manufacturing will simply not happen. Here
at Williams we have tried on several occasions to use the SL technology in a
production environment and it simply falls short. That is not to say that
it will always fall short but that it does now!
On every occasion that we have tried to use the Sanders equipment it too has
fallen short! These and ALL of the RP (fabber if you prefer) technologies
are simply not ready to take on the "production" task whether it be short
run or long haul! We are still a young industry and as such every new facet
that leads us to the end product will be the "hot ticket" at the moment and
the one that actually does propel us to the next level may be years in
coming. We keep hearing that the manufacturers are building bigger better
faster machines but what we really need is a change in technology that is so
different that it will equal the initial introduction of RP to the world.
Bigger faster better will not get us to production part producing equipment.
We are on the way and as with children we must crawl before we can walk and
then run, we still need to crawl for a while!
Karl R. Denton
Lead Engineer
Williams International
-----Original Message-----
From: Marshall Burns [SMTP:Marshall@Ennex.com]
Sent: Friday, August 06, 1999 7:54 PM
To: pdickens@dmu.ac.uk; Sean M. Gladieux; List: Rapid
prototyping
Cc: Linda Thurman; Maurice Cathalifaud; Randy Rua
Subject: Fabber manufacturing
Dear RP-world,
It looks like we've got some debate going in here on the merits
and
feasibility of using fabbers ("rapid prototyping") for
manufacturing. I had
dinner last night with some friends in the Internet business who had
an
interesting insight on this subject. I'll be interested on the
comments of
people on this list to these ideas.
One of the reasons the advent of the Internet has been so
impactful is
what it does to the VALUE CHAIN for the distribution of products.
One might
draw the modern, pre-Internet value chain as follows:
Manufacturer --> Wholesaler --> Distributor --> Retailer -->
Customer
What the Internet does is that it opens the opportunity for direct
interaction between the manufacturer and customer, so that the value
chain
can be reconfigured:
Manufacturer --> Customer --> Manufacturer
The last link above reflects the fact that with the Internet the
customer
has a greater opportunity to interact with and influence the
manufacturer.
If I were writing this posting in a graphical medium, the above
would be a
cycle from manufacturer to customer and back. The reduction of
intermediaries in the relationship between manufacturer and customer
eliminates costs and time from the distribution process, and
improves
communication. The result is greater satisfaction of the customers'
needs,
faster, and at lower cost.
The optimal structure is not always this fully collapsed value
chain,
but there can be opportunities for an Internet intermediary that
adds value
to the product or to the customer/manufacturer interaction:
Manufacturer --> Web portal --> Customer
But instead of going into details on this, let's change back to
OUR
subject of the use of fabbers in manufacturing, and let's look at it
from
this point of view of its effect on the value chain in the design
and
manufacturing of products.
The idea is that what the Internet does to the value chain for
the
DISTRIBUTION of products, the fabber does to the value chain for the
products' DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING.
So the value chain for manufacturing in the industrial era might
be
viewed as:
Concept --> Prototype --> Tooling --> Production -->
Distribution --> Product
What the fabber does is eliminate the need for tooling and mass
production
AND ALSO distribution because the customer (who may be a business or
an
individual) may very well be operating the fabber on-site or at a
local 3-D
Kinko's. Also the concept of a prototype becomes fluid because the
customer
can iterate the product, try out each iteration, and either keep
iterating
or stop iterating, depending on when satisfactory performance is
achieved.
Which iterations are prototypes and which are products? Such
semantic
distinctions are not important. The value chain becomes:
Concept --> Iteration --> Concept
where the last link, as in the above Internet example, would be
shown as a
cycle if I were writing in a graphical environment.
Now I'm sure a lot of people on the list are getting ready to
respond to
this by arguing that for most products a complete and ready-to-use
product
cannot be made on a fabber because of limitations in materials, the
need for
assembly of mechanisms, and the high cost of operating fabbers. To
all those
people, I ask you to think back to the days of the Model T Ford and
ask
yourself if you could have foreseen interstate freeways (autobahns)
and
suburban shopping malls. Think back to IBM's first computer, the
650, and
ask if you could have foreseen the Internet. Think back to Goddard's
first
suborbital rocket launch and ask if you could have foreseen people
walking
on the moon. Of course today's fabbers cannot make even a small
fraction of
the catalog of modern products enjoyed by people around the world.
But
tomorrow's fabbers will.
The next step in this discussion could be to look at what
happens to the
total product value chain when you combine the effects of both
fabbers and
the Internet. I'll leave that for another posting.
Best regards,
Marshall Burns
Marshall@Ennex.com
Ennex Corporation, Los Angeles, USA, (310) 824-8700
www.Ennex.com
For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/
For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 22:52:19 EEST