21st-Century Optimization

I am sitting here in the middle of the Euromold Show (

) in Frankfurt during the first week of December. Trade shows have a way of allowing you to reflect upon things that you might not otherwise spend the time to ponder.

I had a meeting yesterday with a member of the management team of a European automotive manufacturer. As we stood and looked around, he commented on how far the world of development had come. Fifteen years ago he saw the emergence of the first tools that allowed “rapid prototyping.” Those tools meant that you could translate a CAD design directly into a physical structure that closely resembled the CAD data. Back then, the breakthrough seemed to him to be the answer to his prayers. Fast forward to today.

Within sight of the spot that we were standing there were three companies that could clearly produce production parts—in metal—with the same facility as those individual parts that came from the first rapid prototyping systems. His comment to me was that “15 years ago, it seemed like we were at the culmination of an innovative process that gave us rapid prototyping. Now, it feels like we are only at the beginning . . .”

I have spent my entire career in metalworking, always as a manufacturing technology supplier. I have been able to observe (with a level of intimacy) the true struggles of manufacturers to survive. For a long period of time, many of us have acknowledged that the drive for optimization was the real battle being fought on a shop floor. While the battle has raged, it seems that we have failed to develop a common language for the battle. The fundamental questions are: What is optimization? And what are we trying to optimize?

When I began my career in the mid-1970s, the answers to those questions seemed clear. Optimization activities consisted (mostly) of creating and refining processes that made tens of thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of products that were largely the same. We wanted the shop floor to hum—and it did not hum if we disturbed the consistent, repetitive flow of those products, if we added any variation.

In hindsight, the fallacies of this approach are pretty obvious. Everything from huge investments in plant and equipment and working capital—fundamental disconnection with true customer demand—and extraordinarily costly cycles to introduce new products and ideas plagued us. Much has been made of companies fleeing to new production arenas to find low labor rates, as if that fleeing is in fact the solution to “the problem.” I would contend that “the problem” is much more deeply rooted. The emergence of the free flow of real-time digital information has exposed the fact that fundamental premises were just wrong. We were skilled at optimization. We were just optimizing the wrong thing.

We are on the verge of an Industrial Revolution that may rival the storied period of the past. The emergence of enabling technologies that truly capture the power of the digital age is upon us. At Euromold, I saw breathtaking technologies that are used to either capture (though imaging) or create (through software) freeform digital designs that are unhindered by previous manufacturing constraints. I saw software packages that skillfully and easily translate those designs into a form that can be manufactured by a host of methods. And I saw an assortment of technologies that can create, from an impressive array of materials, objects that are usable in production. These objects are created by additive manufacturing processes. The processes use virtually no labor, in the classic definition of “shop floor labor.” They deliver parts in exactly the quantity required—large or small—in precisely the location they are needed. And, by the nature of additive manufacturing, they intrinsically are less wasteful.

Intermingled among those impressive displays of emerging manufacturing technologies at Euromold was a more subtle, but no less notable, presence. University students displayed product development ideas that they had created. As natives to the digital world, they had not yet “learned” the constraints of “real manufacturing”. Therefore, they combined these enabling technologies to make and display products that rival the best from “real manufacturing companies.”

The definition of optimization is clearer to me now. Optimized manufacturing is producing precisely what you want, precisely when you want it, precisely where you want it, in precisely the quantities that you desire, and all of that at a cost which is affordable to the customer. Optimization isn’t about making factories hum. It’s about making the consumers who buy your products hum with delight that they’re getting what they want—particularly consumers like those students, who will demand nothing less. And we can achieve optimization by embracing the tools of this 21st-century Industrial Revolution: Rapid Manufacturing.