Production processes: A lightbulb moment
By Peter Marsh
The emergence of technologies such as three-dimensional printing offers manufacturers big and small the ability to combine the opposing goals of efficiency and flexibility.
A chandelier inspired by microscope photography of pollen spores and manufactured using three-dimensional printing processes
The link between the ethereal beauty of Venice and the hard certainties of the factory production system may seem less than obvious. But the connections begin in the very heart of the island city – in an array of buildings guarded by a pair of large stone lions, just a few minutes’ stroll from the Piazza San Marco.
Like many former industrial sites, the Venetian arsenal is now used mainly for cultural exhibitions. But it was here, more than 500 years ago, that modern manufacturing was born. The shipyard was the first significant user of standardised parts production – by 1500, 16,000 workers toiled there, turning out everything from firearms to large, wooden-hulled ships, some of which were made in a matter of days. Standardised parts have been one of the most critical influences behind the development of the 21st century factory system. The process makes possible the production of the 1bn artefacts that sustain and enhance human life, and employs roughly 10 per cent of the world’s working population.
Manufacturers have always faced one problem, however: how to make complicated and novel items accurately in small quantities. The struggle has been to accommodate the opposing aims of speed and efficiency on one hand, and flexibility and variety on the other.
The emergence of “personalised manufacturing” promises to resolve the contradiction. Using computerised designs, techniques such as three-dimensional printing will enable businesses based in Birmingham or Belize to make complicated parts for products from forklift trucks to space rockets that could be assembled virtually anywhere. Customer choice over how the artifacts look will increase, with only minimal compromise concerning quality or cost.
This development places the world on the brink of the fifth era for manufacturing: “mass personalisation”. In 3D printing – also called “additive manufacturing” – machines based on advances in electronics, laser technology and chemistry build up complex shapes from granules of plastics or metal.
“It adds up to a new industry which reduces immensely the gap between design and production,” says Ian Harris, from the Additive Manufacturing Consortium, a US-based industry think-tank. “Manufacturers will be able to say to their customers, ‘Tell us what you want’ and then they will be able to make [specific products] for them.”
Mass personalisation opens the door to a period of much deeper creativity. Big and small companies will find the inherent restrictions of the interchangeable parts system that began in Venice start to melt away. Standardisation allowed for a remarkable panoply of products – as long as those making them stuck to the fixed “menu” of components. Otherwise, all benefits in terms of speed, accuracy and end price were lost.
Such restrictions will be reduced, according to David Abbott of General Electric – the US group developing applications for the new techniques, along with companies such as Siemens and BMW of Germany; Honda of Japan; Europe’s EADS; and Rolls-Royce in the UK. Additive manufacturing machines already being made by businesses including Stratasys and Z Corporation in the US, EOS in Germany and Sweden’s Arcam will be central to this development.
“The new technology will improve hugely the flexibility that manufacturers have to design new parts and products for a range of reasons – whether this is increasing the fuel efficiency of a gas turbine or changing the look of a kitchen appliance for a reason that is purely aesthetic,” says Mr Abbott. Product developers will be able to design “off piste”, becoming freer to devise new goods in fields ranging from medical devices to home electronics.
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The techniques also potentially level the playing field for those who missed out in earlier periods of manufacturing development. Professor Brent Stucker of the University of Louisville in Kentucky says one of the most significant effects will be a reduction in the amount of conventional industrial infrastructure – machine tools, testing equipment and related factory hardware – that companies and countries require if they are to be considered serious industrial players.
“It will make it easier for nations in the early stages of industrial development – such as in Africa – to leapfrog the conventional route towards building up production capabilities and make a valid contribution to global manufacturing much earlier than would have been regarded possible,” says Prof Stucker.
Such opportunities should also be open to smart individuals, says Prof Stucker. Although the competitive advantages of large and well organised global manufacturers will remain, the new ideas will usher in a return to prominence of the artisan production worker – a breed that in most rich nations has become almost extinct since the demise of the blacksmith.
In the epoch of personalised production, the first products likely be made routinely are items that need to fit in with the unique biological features of an individual. They will include bone and dental implants, hearing aids, stents for unblocking arteries and specialised surgical tools.
These are likely to be followed by objects where individual preferences are important, from fashion-related products and jewellery to lighting systems and furniture. Mass personalisation will also benefit the makers of essential, but often barely noticed, industrial products where the need for variation is linked to engineering function. Valve-makers, for instance, already make up to 500,000 varieties to meet the need for flexible operating procedures in different industries.
Humankind has reached this stage after a journey that began around 1,200BC with the use of craft-based techniques to make products, from pots and pans to arrow heads. During such “low-volume customisation”, everything was made on a one-off basis. Even with semi-formalised techniques such as glass-blowing, procedures were slow and expensive.
Standardisation paved the way for the making of interchangeable parts that, in late 18th-century Britain, helped to stimulate the first industrial revolution – the set of events that established manufacturing as the force behind civilisation’s progress.
Production systems based on standardised parts became embedded in sectors such as machine building and industrial engineering. Still, progress was not straightforward. As late as the 1890s, most industries stuck to craft-based techniques. Introducing the procedures necessary for low-volume standardisation involved considerable cost – investments in machine tools and design – that could seldom be justified unless the savings were also high. And for that to happen, products needed to be made in greater volumes – something that would occur only when demand climbed substantially higher than was mostly the case at the time.
It was carmaker Henry Ford who adapted the interchangeable parts system created in Venice to the needs of the early 20th century. He did this by boosting the scale on which standardised parts production worked.
He also capitalised on new ideas in management and factory procedures, creating in the process “high-volume standardisation” – the third big stage for manufacturing. The benefits could be seen in the price of his company’s Model T, which dropped from $850 in 1909 to $690 in 1912, and to less than half this a decade later. It was a great advertisement for “mass production” – a process others, from the makers of vacuum cleaners to power turbines, were quick to follow.
Ford’s cars were characterised by quality and relative cheapness – but also by the inflexibility of their design. (He famously offered customers “a car painted any colour . . . so long as it’s black”.) High-volume standardisation lent itself to making products that were the same; it worked less well with products that were different.
Some wondered, however, whether the system could be adapted. Among them was Peter Drucker, a management thinker, who in 1973 challenged companies to find ways of using the fewest interchangeable components to make the maximum number of products. Managers at Toyota took up the challenge, and found a way to match customer requirements – that particular colour or fender style – to a set of assembly procedures, all based around standardised parts.
So was created the fourth era of manufacturing. The Toyota production system, or more generically “high-volume customisation”, is the system that gives the world the flexible format on which all kinds of consumer and industrial products are made on a large scale. Though it has proved a brilliant commercial success, the continued use of standardised parts makes it difficult to make fundamental changes in design for established products. With mass personalisation, by contrast, the world will have the chance to build up from basic materials parts that are fashioned according to whatever creative principles their designers and fabricators favour.
What comes next? For all the promise of personalised production, manufacturers will continue to manipulate materials on a molecular basis, as people have done for millennia. The challenge now is how they might work on a sub-molecular level, shaping materials on a scale of nanometres – billionths of a metre.
The challenge was laid down by US physicist Richard Feynman in a celebrated lecture in 1959: “I am not afraid to consider the final question as to whether, ultimately – in the great future – we can arrange the atoms the way we want; the very atoms, all the way down!”
His comment touches on the possibility of arranging the 100 or so available chemical elements into new molecules to create vast numbers of materials that at present can only be dreamed of.
Given the present pace of nanotechnological development, it seems likely that Feynman’s question will be answered in about 2050 – when the sixth era for manufacturing, that of mass-market “nano-production” looks set to start up. The 3,000-year evolution of the global manufacturing system still has plenty of opportunity to progress.
HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY:The evolution of humanity’s most essential innovations
Scientists and technologists rarely discover anything completely new; they generally build on what is already known, writes Peter Marsh.
Indeed, a small number of all-pervading technologies capable of many applications – “general purpose technologies” – have been central to human progress. The way in which they have reinforced each other over time supports indications of how new processes such as three-dimensional printing will transform manufacturing in the next 30 years.
The steam engine, mass-produced steel and electricity are examples of general purpose technology, nearly all of which have influenced manufacturing. Of the 30 so far identified, 11 emerged during the 20th century, of which seven made their presence felt only in the its final half.
The technologies can be divided into product innovations, such as the invention of bronze in 2800BC; innovations involving processes, including the development of moveable-type printing in the 1400s; and those involving organisation, such as 20th century “lean production” – a way of providing for low-cost customisation.
Many economic historians emphasise the linked aspects to such technologies – the way groups of ideas in emerging disciplines combine to provide new economic opportunities.
But rarely does much happen quickly. It often takes half a century or more for the ideas to have a full impact. Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University in Chicago, commenting on the origins of the industrial revolution in the UK in the late 18th century, has pointed out the inaccuracy of characterising this period as the “age of cotton, or the age of steam”. Rather, he says, it was the “age of improvement”, covering diverse activities, many of which had their roots in events years earlier.
Discussing the computer in 2003, half a century after its invention, Nathan Rosenberg of Stanford University observed that the “full impact” of the device “lies well into the future”.
Likewise, the discipline of 3D printing has not suddenly burst into use but has evolved over years. It is based on a number of general purpose technologies, including nanotechnology (the science of manipulating matter at an atomic level), lasers, the computer, the internet and lean production.
General purpose technologies have in the past combined to provide the basis for concentrated periods of economic uplift. Similarly, the links between relatively recent innovations are likely to create opportunities for a new “golden age” for manufacturing in the years leading up to 2050 or so – a welcome prospect in light of today’s economic woes.
The writer is FT manufacturing editor and author of The New Industrial Revolution: Consumers, Globalisation and the End of Mass Production, to be published by Yale University Press in 2012
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.
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