Effect of 3D printing on operations
Debapi Golder
IIM Shillong
Rahul Gupta
IIM Shillong
Bow and Drape, a New York based fashion startup, has recently started using 3-D printing to mass produce some of its clothing accessories. Ford Motors has now put 3D printers on the workstation of its engineers which has helped them to get the look and feel of the design that they are working on, helping them to further refine their design and ergonomics. NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, launched last year, had about seventy parts manufactured by 3-D printing. NASA is now conducting studies to use 3-D printing to produce food in their long duration space missions. These belong to a growing community of organisations, which, realising the potential of 3-D printing, are increasingly looking towards using it to optimize their operations, make it more efficient as well as delve into a plethora of new opportunities offered by it.
Production Cost Benefit:-
The concept of 3D printing uses a process called Additive Manufacturing. In this method, successive layers of material are laid down in different shapes to build the desired object. For this, the only required materials are the binding glue and powdered plastic, glass, rubber and also, steel. The cost benefit of this is many. Firstly, besides the fact that the powdered raw material is cheap, the powder can be reused again and again, which significantly cuts down wastage, lowering down the operational expenses. Secondly, Additive Manufacturing enables the same printing machine to produce any object, irrespective of how complex
the design is, cutting down the expenses incurred in purchasing different machines for the job, as in the existing traditional approach. The costs of the printers for industrial level production are low and with increased usage they will be cheaper as well as more efficient in future.
Inventory management:--
Imagine an e-retailing scenario where the buyer makes a purchase online and the seller instead of taking days to deliver the physical object to him, immediately sends an Autocad file to him containing the design of the object. The buyer, as per his convenience, takes the design and walks into one of the numerous 3-D printing shops in his locality and gets the item printed in a matter of hours! 3-D printing can make this a reality. Now apart from increasing customer satisfaction with respect to drastically cutting down on the product delivery time and increased convenience, this has quite a number of other benefits. First and foremost among them is that, since there is no need to keep stock of the actual product, inventory carrying cost becomes almost nil. Also, because of this same reason, shortage costs (cost incurred when the product is out of stock and the supplier is unable to sell the product) are nullified.