3D printing is buzzing trend these days. If you are not up to speed with the trend, you probably should. Because it changes everything around. Start today from Wikipedia article about 3D printing (aka as additive manufacturing). Today’s announcement about GrabCAD acquisition by Stratasys– leading 3D printing company is another confirmation about important role additive manufacturing will play in the future. The following video is a recording of Autodesk CEO Carl Bass about 3D printing topic – The future of how things are made.
3D printing is changing the way we are going to manufacturing products in the future. This is, of course, very high level statement. It is interesting to go down and see the impact in bits and bytes. For example, how it will impact product structure, or how it will impact product data management or manufacturing planning. You probably don’t associate these two things, but additive manufacturing is changing the product structure and everything that related to that. It certainly impact BOM management too.
My attention caught by the following Engineering.com article – Autodesk and Local Motors Collaborate on First Spark 3D Platform Implementation. The article speaks about collaboration between Local Motors and Autodesk about first large scale industrial implementation of Spark. I found the following passage quite provoking:
According to Local Motors, the Strati simplifies the automotive assembly process and is a result of leveraging the contributions of community, advanced manufacturing tools, and software, like the Spark platform. This could bring many advantages, including reduction in the number of parts in a vehicle’s Bill of Materials (BOM) from 25,000 components to less than 50. The on-demand nature of 3D printing means that automotive manufacturers can change aspects of their design—or even come up with an entirely new one—with little or no additional cost in tooling or time.
The complexity of modern car is skyrocketing. Hardware is part of a complex one element of that. Others – electronic, software are playing significant role. In the past car was a pure mechanical beast. Today, it is a combination of hardware and software on wheels. Who knows, maybe in few years, we will see car bill of material very similar to computer today – few mechanical pieces and lot of software. With changing balance between hardware and rest of car elements, the focus can shift towards multi-discipline product structure.
What is my conclusion? The complexity of products is changing. It is important to see trends. While overall complexity of manufacturing products (cars included) will grow, we might see a decrease in manufacturing complexity of hardware as a result of new manufacturing methods – additive manufacturing (3D printing) will pay a key role here. At the same time, the complexity of multidisciplinary product structure (BOM) will grow. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
Picture credit to ENGINEERING.COM article.
