Understanding the real value additive manufacturing can have on your business

Jeremy Pullin, TCT Advisor and Head of Additive Manufacturing at Sartorius, gets real about considerations for building an additive manufacturing (AM) business case.

When putting together a business case, the easiest (and therefore, unsurprisingly, the most common) thing to do is to focus straight on the second word: the case. Too many are tempted to chuck in just about every word you’ve ever heard on The Apprentice or Dragons Den and fill the pages with terms like ‘Market positioning’, ‘Key verticals’ and ‘Holistic synergy’. Overcook it and you’ll have blown the opportunity to put across what you actually intended.

The correct place to start is by focusing on the first word: the business. What I mean by that is that you have to understand the impact that AM will have on your business. Not the impact that you would like it to have, or the impact that some so-called futurist has told you it will have but rather the difference that it will make to your business.

Be honest with yourself here, some of the differences will be good and some will be bad. Crucially, the universal constant is that AM adoption will be different for each individual business. Don’t just point to successful AM adoptions by other companies and predict that you will have the same successes. Marketing people put out lots of stories of how they have benefitted and how AM has taken them forward and opened new opportunities. They don’t, however, talk about the things that did not go to plan, the abandoned research or implementation projects and the kit that they bought that has less returns than purchasing a stock of Joe Biden baseball caps and trying to sell them on at a Donald Trump rally.

Adoption viability is directly linked to applicability. Some areas like automotive and aerospace are great fits for AM. Others are not. Even when you find a similar sized company, in your exact market segment that has adopted AM, you simply cannot draw direct parallels and base meaningful predictions on them. This seems a little odd. After all, as businesses we are always monitoring our competitors and customer activities. However, a key driver for implementation of any disruptive changes within a business, whether product offering shifts or technological shifts, are the people. Since technology has allowed businesses to operate more globally, company culture has become less and less defined by national conditions meaning that people have risen up the ranks in terms of importance in defining the culture of organisations.

To put it simply, if you have an effective core of people that not just embrace change but hunger for it and they are in the right positions then you are off. If, however, you have influential groups who are personally and professionally invested in the status quo, you are on a rocky road. The requirements at a human level for changes such as adopting AM are vision and faith. You may have the most compelling business case full of technical details, projections, market intelligence, etc. and paint a picture of a future where potential benefits from AM are like ripe fruit sitting on low lying branches just waiting to be picked. However, back in the real world, if you have just one person somewhere in your approval chain whose limits of vision is reluctantly daring to imagine a change of font on the title bar of their capacity reports, then you are going to have to think again about how much change will/can actually be achieved.

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Putting together a business plan for AM may seem like a simple thing. You can dive into so many AM websites and find people waxing lyrical about what AM can offer. You can cut and paste huge sections of this sort of stuff, stick a title on the top saying ‘AM adoption business case’, put your name on the bottom and think, job done. If any business leader signs off based on that, then they should not be in their position. To properly quantify and explain the impact on a business you need to perform value stream mapping of your proposed processes to identify and understand just where the value adding is. You need to understand the problems that you are trying to solve rather than simply becoming obsessed with the opportunities that you are creating. Most importantly of all, you absolutely must know and understand the appetite that your organisation has for adoption and set and communicate realistic expectations based on that.

by Jeremy Pullin

4 August 2023

14:00