Product Development at Laser Speed

A Model for Getting to Market First

A White Paper by 3D Systems, Inc.

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Introduction

The Rewards for Being First to Market

Accelerating time-to-market: It's virtually every manufacturing organization's primary goal. Leaving aside the instinctive idea that it's best to be first, what are the measurable rewards for getting to market sooner?

§         Increased sales through longer sales life. The earlier your product hits the market relative to the competition, the longer it stays there — and the longer your peak sales period.

• Increased margins. The “newer” your product — the longer it's on the market with no or minimal competition — the longer consumers will pay a premium purchase price. In this way, time-to-market can often have a greater impact on your product's bottom line than development cost. One study, by consultants at McKinsey & Co., revealed that a product arriving six months late to market sacrifices 33% of its profit potential — whereas a production budget overrun of 50% affects profits by just 3.5% on average.[1] (Actual values are likely to vary from industry to industry.)

 §         Increased product loyalty. Again, when you get the first opportunity at customers — especially early adopters — you get first crack at customers most likely to upgrade, customize, or purchase companion products. (Of course, being first to market with an inferior product can result in the exact opposite — a customer who will think twice before purchasing your product again.)

§         More resale opportunities. If you manufacture components or products that other companies can private-label; being first can often clinch the contract.

§         Higher market responsiveness. The faster you can create products that satisfy new or changing customer needs, or respond to changing styles or trends, the more you can capitalize on them as opportunities.

§         Seize, maintain, and promote a leadership position. Unlike “best,” “best-selling,” “fastest,” and other superlative market positions, “first” is the only market position a competitor can't take away. And repeated firsts establish you as the innovator and leader in the market.

Clearly, accelerating time to market supports achievement of just about every primary sales and marketing goal your company has — or should have — in today's increasingly competitive, increasingly global marketplace. And the challenge facing every manufacturing organization today is to continually accelerate time to market, while improving product quality and reducing development costs.

Reaping the Rewards with Solid Imaging Solutions

For a decade and a half, the world’s leading manufacturing organizations — including many Fortune 500 manufacturers — have been meeting the first-to-market challenge with solid imaging. Solid imaging technologies enable companies already using 3D CAD (computer aided design) modeling to transform their existing 3D CAD data into three-dimensional objects needed at crucial points in the product development cycle. 

In what follows, we’ll summarize the time-to-market obstacles at each phase of the product development cycle: the concept phase, the development phase, and the production phase. And we’ll explain how three solid imaging technologies — solid object printing, stereolithography, and rapid production tooling — can help overcome those obstacles, trimming time and expense at every phase.

Accelerating the Concept Phase with Solid Imaging

Every product starts — or should start — as a concept that addresses an expressed or perceived customer need. The need can be revealed in any number of ways, from customer feedback on existing products, to focus group data, to marketing research, to raw inspiration. Customer needs can even be revealed by accident: witness the ubiquitous 3M Post-It^® Note, the direct descendant of failed efforts to produce a permanent adhesive.

In highly evolved manufacturing organizations, the product development process moves from this initial concept to the creation of two essential documents. One of these, the business opportunity plan (BOP), is essentially a classic business plan focused on the particular product. It documents the perceived market for the product, the competitive landscape, the marketing and sales strategies, and projected costs, revenues, and profits. In many cases, corporate executives and board members will decide whether to proceed with production based on the information (particularly the financials) in the BOP. The other, the marketing requirements document (MRD), functions as a written blueprint for the product, listing all the required features that engineers will need to include. Engineers will take their marching orders directly from the MRD.

The Need to Improve Communication

Assembling these documents — and getting them approved so that the team can proceed to the design phase — requires continual, effective communication between groups with extremely different backgrounds and objectives. Engineers need to convey their initial design ideas to product managers. OEMs need to understand how the product works with their own products, and suggest revisions where necessary. Suppliers need to understand the product to suggest solutions and develop accurate and economical quotes and lead times. Marketing needs to "picture" the product to develop promotional and advertising concepts, design packaging, and assess the product’s ability to satisfy consumer demands. Focus groups need to understand the product in order to give valuable input. Key customers and resellers need to be "sold" in order to realistically project financials.

Most important, to keep total product costs at a minimum, the manufacturing staff needs to evaluate the feasibility of executing the design, to the greatest degree possible, at this initial phase. As Product Development Industry Consultant Terry Wohlers stresses (and Figure 1 illustrates), “The cost of an engineering change increases by roughly an order of magnitude as the design progresses from one significant phase of development to the next.”[2]

Despite the power of solid modeling software, the chief obstacle to effective communication is the communications vehicle itself: the flat CAD drawing. Accurately interpreting a two-dimensional drawing as a three-dimensional object is difficult enough for experienced engineers; it's even more difficult for people without regular experience interpreting drawings, which describes just about everyone else in the loop. The greater the reliance on two-dimensional drawings, the greater the likelihood that a product can proceed to the development phase with unnoticed, undesirable features or design flaws that will at minimum result in delays, and at worse require expensive tooling redesigns and remanufacture.

Figure 1 (Data from: John Krouse, Krouse Associates)

The Communications Power of Solid Object Printing

Development teams can build three-dimensional models to eliminate misinterpretation, and to identify errors that could lead to costly downstream problems. But because traditional hand carved models are expensive and typically take weeks to produce, the benefits of building enough models to perfect the design must constantly be weighed against the opportunity cost of delaying time-to-market.

Solid object printing can alleviate the time constraint.  A solid object printer is a device that quickly "prints" inexpensive three-dimensional models from 3D CAD data, in much the same way that a desktop inkjet printer prints two-dimensional output from a word processor. In addition to dramatically reducing the modeling/time-to-market tradeoff, solid object printing lets development teams:

• Convey product concepts as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Instead of struggling to interpret drawings, people can hold a model in their hands, view it from different angles — and get an immediate and accurate representation of the product's shape and position of its features.
• Identify costly mistakes before proceeding to development. Everybody — from marketing staff to machinists — can quickly spot potential problems or undesirable features early, before it costs time and money to fix them.
• Win faster approvals. Decision-makers respond more quickly — and often more favorably — to physical models than to renderings, drawings and text presentations.
• Impress customers and drive sales. Models elevate sales presentations and bid packages to a higher level — and inspire confidence that you can quickly deliver a finished product.
• Protect ideas. Solid object printing keeps your model making in-house — protecting your ideas at this critical early stage of development.

The largest manufacturing companies in the world adopted solid object printing early — and have reaped substantial time-to-market and profit rewards. “What once would have taken months using conventional methods took just a couple of weeks,” says Remi Renaud, Supervisor of CAD/CAM Design at Ford Motor Company's Chassis Division. “Solid object printing saved us millions of dollars in manufacturing, paying for itself within the first three months versus conventional methods.”

The Power to Iterate is the Power to Innovate

Solid object printing has the potential to deliver more than improved communication between key functional groups. The faster and more accessible the solid object printing solution, the more flexibility to model multiple iterations and variations  — thereby enabling you to develop higher quality, more innovative products in a shorter timeframe. Plus, as Wohlers notes, "Increasing the number of early iterations can dramatically reduce the design effort that occurs late in the design process."[3]

3D Systems’ ThermoJetä solid object printer extends the maximum communication and innovation benefits of solid object printing to virtually everyone on the product development team. The ThermoJet printer makes it possible to:

• Build models in a few hours — at an average cost of $50 per model.[4] 
• Build directly from 3D CAD files. Just select the file(s) and click "Submit."
• Bring model making to any office. About the size of an office copier, the ThermoJet printer runs on standard electrical current, plugs into a standard outlet, and uses materials that are safe to handle.
• Put model making power on every desktop. Installed on a LAN, the ThermoJet printer lets you queue and manage multiple builds from multiple workstations.

Over a TCP/IP network, the ThermoJet printer also offers 3-D faxing, enabling a user to “print” an object from his or her workstation to a ThermoJet printer at another remote location. Within minutes, a user can “send” a three-dimensional model to anyone, anywhere in the world.

Another Communications Solution: Stereolithography

Stereolithography systems were available before solid object printers; as a result, many leading companies have used, and continue to use, stereolithography models to improve concept communication. While stereolithography systems have higher acquisition and operating costs than solid object printers, they build more detailed and more durable models — models that can be especially effective tools for winning approval from top level executives, key customers and business partners. Spencer Johnson of Logitech, a computer peripheral manufacturer that uses 3D Systems’ SLA^® series stereolithography systems, describes one such case: “The total time from request for quote to finished prototype was seven working days. The model helped us clinch the business and beat a good competitor.”

More important, many companies can justify the additional expense of stereolithography because it helps accelerate development in so many other ways, throughout the remaining phases of the development cycle. We’ll examine some of those ways in the next section of the paper.

Accelerating Development with Rapid Prototyping

Once the product concept is approved — and the MRD and BOP solidified — the second major phase of the product development cycle, the development phase, begins. The development phase is a prototyping and testing phase for finalizing the design and eliminating flaws before proceeding to manufacturing. It can consist of several overlapping and interdependent test cycles, including:

• Alpha, during which detailed design drawings and, eventually, the first test prototypes are created from the MRD specs. The prototypes are then tested for operation, form/fit/function, performance, and so on: changes resulting from Alpha testing — which ideally are FINAL changes, are made to the MRD. Parallel to Alpha testing, downstream manufacturing and distribution plans also begin to take shape.

• Proof of development (POD). Here the overall architecture is frozen; the only changes being made should be those required to resolve problems uncovered in Alpha testing. It's during the POD cycle that the procurement process begins for pilot production materials, bids are solicited from vendors supplying special parts and assemblies, and any long-lead time production materials are sourced.

•  Pilot production. At this point beta versions of the product are built, using the regular manufacturing process. The betas are then tested internally and, most importantly, externally. The beta versions are also subject to critical standards reviews, such as UL testing and CE certification. Technically, the product design is frozen at this stage; however, critical flaws would require a costly second beta round.

In the Alpha and POD stages, the chief potential bottleneck — and the chief potential obstacle to quality — is prototyping lead time. Traditional prototyping methods — making prototypes by hand, or using computer numerical control (CNC) machining to generate tools from solid CAD data — require significant lead times that leave product development teams faced with two undesirable options: lengthening the development phase, thereby sacrificing the advantages of getting to market faster; or spotting and correcting fewer flaws before production, thereby risking huge downstream costs associated with manufacturing floor changes or, worse yet, product recalls.

Pilot production requires creation of tools for making actual parts. This is another high lead time item: machining a single tool can take several weeks or months, depending on the complexity of the part. Again, weighing this lead time against time-to-market forces the development team to set an earlier design freeze date.

Stereolithography: Putting the "Rapid" in Rapid Prototyping

For more than a decade, leading manufacturers — including many Fortune 500 manufacturers — have been using stereolithography to reduce prototyping and tooling lead times. Stereolithography is a sophisticated system of computer hardware and software, mechanics, chemistry, optics and laser technology that builds — or more accurately, “grows” — models, prototypes, or mold patterns from a vat of UV-sensitive photopolymer plastic, based on solid CAD data. Compared to the solid object printing technology discussed in the previous section, stereolithography builds parts that are stronger, clearer, smoother, more durable, and more accurate representations of solid CAD data. While a stereolithography part might take several hours to build, this is still days or even weeks faster than hand modeling or CNC prototyping.

The result is that with stereolithography, product development teams can dramatically shorten the development phase, while increasing product quality. World-renowned manufacturing organizations — companies such as Hasbro, Porsche, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, Johnson & Johnson, to name a very few — use stereolithography every day to:

• Build more prototypes and test more options. Available polymers let manufacturers create stereolithography parts that are flexible enough for snap-fit testing, clear enough for fluid and air flow testing, and durable enough for high speed and high temperature testing. And stereolithography lets you build more prototypes, and do more of this testing, in a shorter period of time­­. This enables designers to try more variations and innovations, while simultaneously making it easier to spot flaws before proceeding to tooling or manufacturing.

§         Create patterns for investment casting, in-house. Compared to traditional wax patterns, stereolithography patterns are more durable and more accurate (especially for more complex patterns), resulting in better quality investment-cast parts.

§         Dramatically reduce the time — and potential waste — of producing manufacturing aids. Normally, assembly fixtures, drilling guides, and jigs used to produce beta versions are machined using the same processes used to create actual production parts; this commits considerable labor and lead time into a non-salable item that may have to be changed. Stereolithography enables development teams to quickly create manufacturing aids that are durable enough to last the entire pre-production cycle, but inexpensive enough to replace with production tooling.

§         Reduce acquisition costs — and increase vendor options. Including stereolithography models in bid packages (together with drawings and documentation) not only gives vendors a better understanding of manufacturing and assembly requirements — it often eliminates the doubts that cause vendors to pad their bids, or not bid at all. The result is more competitively priced bids — and more of them from which to choose.

• Create higher quality concept models. Many companies use stereolithography to build highly detailed models, or even working models, for sales presentations or trade shows: in addition to being a far surer and faster way to convey the product concept, it makes a very favorable impact on the potential customer.
• Quickly and inexpensively create preproduction tools. Due to their high degree of accuracy and smooth finish, stereolithography parts can be used as mold masters for preproduction or beta assemblies — assemblies which, after all, are still subject to change following beta testing and UL or CE certification. Stereolithography molds can also be used for mold testing.  Create injection molded parts quickly to validate flow analysis or create sample parts in the engineering plastic of choice for functional testing.
• Do limited production runs. As material properties continue to evolve, the opportunity for limited production runs becomes more prevalent. The more accurate and durable the parts produced by a stereolithography system, the more likely that system can be used for limited production runs — short runs of final production parts. This enables manufacturers to seize small-volume opportunities profitably by skipping straight from completed beta testing to production, without the lead time expense for tooling.

Economical Prototyping with Solid Object Printing

While models produced through solid object printing aren’t themselves durable enough for most prototype testing, they work very well as master patterns for investment casting. Development teams can “print” models, cast a mold from them, and then use the mold to create prototype parts from metal. It’s an extra step, but still much faster and accurate — and in the long run, less expensive — than building prototypes by hand.

Accelerating Production with Rapid Production Tooling

Once the pilot production stage of the development phase is complete, the development team has a final production prototype, a prototype that has passed beta testing and achieved any necessary certifications. The development cycle proceeds to the production phase — the actual manufacturing of the product.

For injection molded and die cast applications, before actual manufacturing can begin, inserts (a component of the mold used for production) must be created.

Time Consuming Processes that Limit Moldmaking Output

Typically, tools and inserts are built using multiple processes, often in combination. One of these, CNC machining, involves entering data into a computer, which in turn operates a machine that cuts the tool or insert from a block of metal. While preparing and entering CNC data requires significant lead time and man hours, the actual machining of the part is automated, and repeats of the same tool or insert can be machined without reentering the data. However, CNC requires regular monitoring, and it’s not as precise as electrode discharge machine (EDM), and therefore not as desirable for creating inserts requiring detailed features or super-smooth finishes.

A second commonly used process, EDM, uses carbon electrodes to erode shapes into the tool or insert. Compared to the other machining technologies, EDM is extremely precise, and enables moldmakers to build inserts with exceptionally fine details.

Building tools and inserts using EDM requires long lead times — usually 10 to 12 weeks. Before the electrode can be used, it must be designed and cut out of a block of carbon.  Three electrodes are typically created for each detail.  Machining the electrodes is a messy task that is usually done in a dedicated facility due to the amount of carbon dust that is created.  For each tool, tens to hundreds of electrodes are often required.  The process time for EDM is a combination of electrode creation and utilization.

Even when these two technologies are used in their most effective combination, moldmaking times are measured in weeks or months — and often longer for molds used to create parts with high feature density or complex geometry. But far more detrimental than this is the lead time required to access moldmaking resources. Because both the tool and the insert are made serially by the same methods and by the same people, moldmaking shops have fixed limits to the number of molds they can turn out in a week, month, or year — limits they can increase only by hiring more moldmakers and investing in more equipment. Combine this with the relative scarcity of moldmaking shops, and most development teams must schedule time with moldmakers months in advance.

Rapid production tooling: A More Effective Division of Labor

Rapid production tooling enables moldmakers to create a tool insert directly from a prototype part. The process, simplified, is as follows:

1. A flexible moldmaking material, such as RTV, is cast around core or cavity master patterns. These patterns can be created with a stereolithography system or (in some cases) a solid object printer, as well as by hand.
2. A metal slurry is cast in the RTV mold.
3. A final insert is sintered from the cured metal part.
4. The sintered insert is brought to full density by infiltration with a copper alloy.

For everyone who uses, purchases, or specifies injection mold tooling, rapid production moldmaking accelerates the production of tools and offers significant advantages over machining:

• It’s faster — especially for more complex inserts. Using rapid production tooling techniques, an insert can be completed in days (as few as 8 calendar days, using the 3D Keltool^® process, 3D Systems’ rapid production tooling technology) — no matter how complex or feature-dense the insert. The more complex the part, the more time rapid production tooling saves.
• It maximizes fixed moldmaking resources. Rapid production tooling requires far fewer man hours than machining; 90% of the process is unattended. Plus, these processes offload the bulk of insert creation from CNC and EDM equipment to other equipment. The result: Moldmaking shops can create far more inserts with their existing personnel and CNC/EDM equipment.
• It’s easily and more quickly repeatable. Once the RTV mold is created, additional inserts can be made simultaneously as opposed to serially. So while it may take eight days to create the first insert, within the next eight days as many as 28 inserts could be created.
• It allows more convenience and flexibility in modifying the master pattern. If details need to be added, it’s much easier to build them into a solid object print or stereolithography master than to machine or erode them into a metal insert.

By both minimizing the time it takes to create an insert and maximizing the output from fixed moldmaking resources, these production tooling techniques dramatically reduce moldmaking — and manufacturing — lead times and costs. And creating the pattern using stereolithography, instead of conventional prototyping or hand-modeling methods, can further compound the time savings.

Increasing Cycle Times with Heat Conductive Insert Materials

Once the inserts and tools are created, production begins. From this point forward, there are essentially two remaining ways to accelerate production: increase the number of molds creating parts, and decrease the cycle time (the time that elapses between one demolding and the next).

The highly conductive properties of the inserts created by the 3D Keltool process (due to the infiltration of a copper alloy) allow molders to decrease cycle times. Given that most cycle times are less than a minute, shaving seconds per cycle can result in significant percentage gains — and significantly improve production on every shift.

Conclusion: Accelerate Every Phase of Product Development with Solid Imaging Solutions

As we’ve demonstrated throughout this paper, solid imaging technologies can trim time and expense from every phase of the development cycle — helping you deliver higher quality products in less time, for far less cost than conventional modeling, prototyping, and manufacturing methods.

3D Systems offers state-of-the-art solutions in each of the three solid imaging technology areas, each of which can accelerate several product development and production tasks.

3D Systems’ ThermoJet solid object printer represents a revolution in solid object printing and concept modeling. Fast, convenient, and extremely easy to use, it builds models directly from solid CAD files, quickly and inexpensively. Designed for the office, the ThermoJet printer plugs into a standard office outlet, runs on standard office current, and uses safe, disposable materials. Like a desktop computer printer, it can be networked — via the office LAN, to bring solid object printing to multiple desktops, or over a wide area network (WAN) or TCP/IP network, to enable “faxing” of solid objects between offices around the world.

In addition to concept modeling, the ThermoJet printer’s models are also suitable for use as master patterns for investment casting, depending on the level of precision required. It produces models with an exceptionally smooth surface finish, made from a material that is compatible with standard investment casting practices.

3D Systems’ SLA series stereolithography systems are the most mature, technologically advanced, and widely used rapid prototyping systems in the world. The world’s most respected and successful manufacturers — including leaders in the automotive, aerospace, consumer products, consumer electronics, and medical industries — use SLA systems to build precision prototypes for everything from high-fidelity concept modeling, to form, fit, and functional prototypes and flow testing, to master patterns for tooling and investment casting. Used in conjunction with stereolithography materials developed by our business partner, Ciba Specialty Chemicals, SLA systems can also be used for limited production runs of working and non-working parts — parts that, with minimal post-processing, can be assembled directly into finished products.

The 3D Keltool process lets moldmakers increase their productivity by creating more tool inserts with their existing human and machine resources. The process, proven and improved over the past quarter-century, creates injection and die cast inserts from stereolithography, solid object printer, or hand-made master patterns in eight calendar days — as compared to the weeks or months it takes to produce inserts using conventional machining methods. The 3D Keltool process creates inserts with 30% copper alloy content, for greater thermal conductivity that shortens production cycle times. This technology, which has been used by hundreds of companies to produce thousands of molds and millions of parts, is now being licensed by 3D Systems to moldmakers and manufacturers who need a fast, affordable, and time compressing in-house tooling solution.

As the table above shows, together the three solid imaging solutions offer time- and cost-saving benefits at every stage of the development cycle.

The Time to Start is Now

These technologies — as part of a company-wide rapid product development culture — have already yielded significant time-to-market gains, cost savings, and margin increases for the companies that have adopted them. The auto industry offers a prime example. Last year GM Chairman John F. Smith Jr. reported that, “Our product development cycle has gone from 36 months just three years ago, to 24 months today. That’s a 33-percent reduction, and an 18-month cycle is now in sight…We will have an average of one new product every 28 days between now and the middle of the next decade.”[5]

What’s more, the companies that adopt the rapid product development technologies and culture earliest are realizing the greatest gains — and the companies that resist are falling farther behind.

 For more information on how 3D Systems’ solid imaging solutions can start you on the road to shorter development cycles, better communication, improved product quality and lower costs, call us today at 1.888.337.9786, or visit our Web site at www.3dsystems.com.