3D Printers Were Never Going To ‘Save’ Manufacturing, But Here’s How They’re Quickly Becoming An Industry 4.0 Staple

Around 2015, the headlines and hysteria surrounding 3D printing reached a fever pitch. If you subscribed to the buzz—and so many of us did—the revolution was nigh. Our homes would soon be equipped with personal printers that would make everything from furniture to tools to replacement parts. And when it came to the industrial world, we were entering a whole new era.

"3D printers will change manufacturing," declared The Economist.

In reality, there's just no way anything could have ever lived up to the hype.

Here we are a few years later and there's not a flashy headline in sight. And that's okay. 3D printing's superhero era has quietly given way to practical and important use cases within manufacturing companies. It is not the savior it was made out to be, but it's proving to be an invaluable tool in the Industry 4.0 toolkit—and that's exactly how it should have been viewed all along.

3D printing, or additive manufacturing, has indeed come a long way over the last decade. But rather than revolutionize the industry, it's found value by augmenting traditional techniques.

One way that's happened is by providing a quicker, more seamless way for manufacturers to create custom parts, like fixtures. Manufacturers used to send off metal designs to a fixture building shop and wait six weeks or more for the completed product. With 3D printing, you can input the design and within about 20 minutes, you’ve got a holding fixture made from reinforced nylon.

Another way it's being used is to quickly create prototypes for certain design companies or parts suppliers. When a customer wants to see a part in physical form, a few clicks and a 3D printer will begin spitting it out.

Finally, manufacturers are leveraging additive to create parts for new and lower volume products. They reduce costs by avoiding paying for expensive molds before the product proves viable. That said, once the product takes off and orders come flying in, 3D printers generally become less attractive for manufacturing at a massive scale, as costs per job are still comparatively pricey. Individual prints can cost a few hundred dollars.

As Herbert Yu puts it, 3D printers are moving through the value chain. Yu is the director of revenue growth initiatives at Formlabs, which focuses on making 3D printers that can help manufacturers easily create industrial-quality parts at an affordable price. It's the largest supplier of professional stereolithography and selective laser sintering 3D printers in the world. Yu says manufacturers started using 3D printers for product development, but more and more companies are now putting it to work in end-use production. 3D printers allow manufacturers to diversify their materials portfolio, better equip their innovation centers, and provide extra capacity in times of need. It may have been unfairly labeled a panacea a decade ago, but these days the silence on the topic hardly matches the real-world market 3D printing has found.

"The bubble kind of burst in 2014, when everyone was focused on the B2C market," Yu says. "The true players that remained were focused on the B2B side." The industry will continue to grow as 3D printing developers find new ways to improve material properties. "It could be better surface finishes, better heat resistance, better chemical resistance," he says. "There are so many different applications we can serve through advanced material development."

Yu also says to look out for a trend toward mass personalization. Formlabs collaborated with Hasbro HAS on the toymaker's Selfie Series, an opportunity for fans to send in selfies, select personalization options like hair color and skin tone, and receive a customized, mini-me superhero. "We reached the point where they could achieve mass product personalization both from an operations perspective but also from a cost perspective," Yu says. He expects mass personalization to continue growing in popularity.

3D printing capabilities will continue to progress. I’d expect to see more of a technique termed hybrid manufacturing, where 3D printers lay down plastic blobs roughly the size of whatever a manufacturer is making, and then the CNC machine mills it, grinds it, and finishes it.

But innovation within the plastics space isn't the only way the industry will move forward. In many ways, advancements in metals-based additive manufacturing represent the next frontier. Currently, the most prominent use case for metals printing relates to tiny, high-strength parts. Machining these parts can be exorbitantly expensive, but small shops are popping up that can do it with additive. The applications range from small gears for manufactures to key parts in medical devices.

Large metal parts are coming next. It's already possible to create metal parts as large as 10 feet tall by four feet wide, the machine circling round and round depositing the material. While these machines tend not to be as exact as those printing smaller parts, that precision is on the way. And that will mean exciting things for manufacturers.

For some manufacturers, 3D printers had become the thing they fire up to impress kids on plant tours. To be sure, the ability to produce ooohs and ahhhs should not be discounted—as I’ve written before, we need more young people excited about the advanced capabilities of new age manufacturing.

But 3D printing is more than a show pony. As more companies update their shop floors with the latest in Industry 4.0 technology, 3D printing can and should be a staple of the arsenal. The next frontier in the form of metals promises to deliver even more value.

3D printing may not have fulfilled the hype that began a decade ago, but it's rapidly becoming technology table stakes on the shop floor to help improve margins and turnaround times. The additive manufacturing market is projected to double by 2026—so if you haven't found a way to integrate 3D printing into your production line, that's a lot of potential growth to leave on the table.