Mass production with AM: What does each fleet strategy entail for vertically integrated businesses?

Over the years, we have come to define mass production with AM through different angles:

- Starting at a few thousand qualified parts a year, produced on industrial platforms, with traceability on every unit

- Starting at hundreds of thousands of parts a year produced across hundreds of small machines

- Producing on-demand and tailor-made for each individual.

While these definitions make sense in today’s modern manufacturing landscape, the production economics they imply and the bottlenecks they reveal, including the ways those bottlenecks differ between Asian and Western manufacturing ecosystems vary significantly from one company to another.
Beyond the production question, for vertically integrated businesses that rely on AM, it’s crucial to understand what it takes to build a (consumer) business on AM: how demand is captured, how a digital fit process replaces a retail one, and if possible, what the supply chain and sustainability case looks like.

Acknowledging the ins and outs of mass production with AM might shape how companies invest, what they promise customers, and where the boundary sits between additive and conventional manufacturing.

That’s the goal of the upcoming Additive Talks session, scheduled for Wednesday, October 28th, from 15:30 to 16:30 CET (10:30 am to 11:30 am EDT).
This session brings together two companies approaching production volume from opposite directions: