3D printing can be time consuming, expensive, and difficult, however that’s not the case with the Form 2 by Formlabs. The Form 2 is transforming the way engineers design, manufacture, connect to, and service their products.

After purchasing the Formlabs Complete Package Plus from EAC, Chris Herman, Principal at Scheme Inc. reported back to EAC – “35-minutes. Un-boxing, hardwire LAN (the machine notified me of the firmware update, by just turning it on), update, joined the WiFi network, sent the print. I then un-boxed the cleaning station while it was printing… and added it to my dashboard.”

Herman works across industries making prototypes for consumer, medical, and industrial goods. Many of his designs and prototypes are destined for human interaction; items that are tactile and handheld. He needed the versatility to meet and exceed his customer’s expectations.

Herman owns and has used a variety of 3D printers. According to him it is the price, build volume, accuracy, fit and finish, and wide variety of materials that set the Form 2 apart from its competition.

“I actually looked at the Form 1 right when [Formlabs] was coming out with it, it was right before the Form 1+. In talking with them I said, you know, it’s close but it’d be great if it was just a little bit bigger.” Formlabs listened to their customers and prospects and developed the Form 2 with a larger build volume of 145 x 145 x 175 mm. (Compared to the Form 1’s 125 x 125 x 165 mm)

When the Form 2 was released with the larger build volume, Herman said it was “totally in the sweet spot. They basically have a build volume I can easily get a handheld remote, consumer good, or anything like that.”

The biggest problem Herman faced with FDM printers is their dimensional accuracy. He stated that the surface finish and accuracy of the Form 2 is unbeatable. “The Form 2 is just a lot easier, the prints are crisp, and they print great,” said Herman.

3D printing with an FDM printer doesn’t work well for parts with very thin walls or delicate features that are very small. The filament is too big. Due to the fact that it’s laying down filament, there is a tendency for pores and air spaces in the part, and potentially pinholes when you get down to those very small scales. “The porosity becomes such a large percentage of what’s laid down, you end up with a weak part. That’s the extreme end of it, beyond getting a poor representation of the part, [FDM printers] just can’t print it,” said Herman.

The Form 2, on the other hand, features high-resolution, laser-sharp prints with an incredible surface finish. “This guy (the Form 2), like any other SLA, is seven-times more accurate in almost every direction. There’s tons of stuff that you can print. And don’t forget about all of the material options” said Herman.

Herman said industrial designers will especially appreciate the Form 2. “They don’t like the FDM because of its rough look. All of the engineers here love it, but we have four industrial designers who want the pretty parts that feel right or are easily sandable. FDM has too many processes: glaze it, sand it, prime it, and possibly fill it.“

Formlabs has two resin types Standard and Functional. Within these categories, there are a variety of resin materials: Standard (Clear, White, Grey, and Black), Flexible, Dental SG, Castable, and Tough.

Herman thinks industrial designers will really benefit from the soft touch (Flexible) material. Formlabs calls it Flexible Resin because it is tactile and impact resistant. It is a Functional Resin that brings versatility to your 3D printer.

When asked to name his favorite thing about the Form 2, Herman proceeded to show us a tray he printed and said “the surface finish and accuracy, that’s four hours of printing and less than an hours worth of hand finishing. You can’t beat it. You can’t beat it”

For more information about the Form 2 by Formlabs, contact our Formlabs Specialist here.

Recently you may have heard talk around the topic of agile engineering from PTC, Formlabs, and even us, here at EAC. We have many events throughout the year regarding lean product development; reviewing agile engineering, systems thinking methodologies, and more. Be sure to check if we’re hosting an event in your area here.

In the meantime, our friend Joris Peels over at Formlabs wrote an article discussing why agile engineering is the future of product design that reviews the benefits of agile engineering versus “the old way.”

In case you haven’t heard, in May EAC Product Development Solutions became a North American Channel Partner in the commercial, discrete manufacturing, and educational space. We now offer The Form 2 3D Printer to our customer’s to insert high-quality stereolithography (SLA) prototyping into their engineering and design workflows, for a fraction of the cost of competing technologies. Learn more about The Form 2 here.

Why Agile Engineering is the Future of Product Design

Agile Engineering is a popular process in software development, but few hardware teams apply these practices to develop physical products. For many hardware teams, implementing Agile Engineering practices saves time and money and improves the end product.

In Agile Engineering, teams quickly iterate, test, and gather feedback on product design. It divides big challenges into measurable chunks of work and promises more accurate and rapid product development cycles. Teams are self-managed and work in short two-week sprints driven by user feedback. This feedback guides teams to build a product that meets user needs.

Rather than start with a lengthy requirements phase that covers the entire span of the project, requirements are created as the team works. Requirements are specific and tied to user value. By testing features and new builds, teams verify if they are solving user problems and developing the right product.

The Benefits of Agile Engineering

With digital manufacturing tools such as mills, laser cutters, and 3D printers, hardware engineers can now develop ideas while concurrently testing them with users. Key benefits of this method include:

• Continuous collection of feedback from customers means that designs are tracking with customer needs.
• The interplay between design, engineering, manufacturing, and marketing allows teams to understand each other’s needs and challenges better.
• Each iteration gives you a physical prototype to hold and discuss. Kinesthetic learners, experiential learners, non-technical people in a technical meeting, people new to the subject matter–they will all learn from holding and discussing an actual prototype.
• Testing the physical prototype helps you identify and solve problems.
• More, quicker, and cheaper iterations mean that a higher number of possible solution paths can be explored.
• Continuous testing means that engineering risks are exposed throughout the process.

Agile Engineering unites teams across the organization and creates a better end product. By responding to user feedback with prototypes, teams develop products that users want.

The Old Way vs. Agile Engineering

In the “Old Way,” teams predicted demand months in advance. They turned a single prototype into mass manufactured goods. This method was risky: teams had a hard time predicting future demand. As a result, companies often had either product shortage or unsold inventory. Instead, Agile Engineering tests prototypes. It improves them with consumer feedback. This method develops products quicker and reduces risk.

*After week 7, an Agile team receives feedback on sales numbers. If the product is successful, and if it can be produced more cheaply using mass manufacturing, then they may decide to design the case for injection molding.

In the Old Way, the company has to predict market demand and consumer tastes months in advance. If Company A makes a decision once a season, and Company B makes informed decisions every day, then Company B will get ahead. Agile Engineering saves companies not only time, but also money in the long run. The Agile method has a higher startup time and initial cost, but the cost per final product is low. Plus, the end product is shaped by market demands, ultimately yielding greater profit.

Cost Comparison

Another benefit of Agile Engineering is that it encourages teams to fail quickly. By failing faster, teams learn and improve at a faster pace than those that do not. Learning from failure through prototypes helps companies quickly build better products. By validating assumptions and collecting data, these products are made in a more accurate, evidential way.

With traditional methods, teams painstakingly make world maps and then spend months planning a possible route through this imagined world. Only then do they have a product and really know where they stand. With Agile Engineering, products emerge in the first week of product development. Teams set off and check their compass often.

EAC Product Development Solutions (EAC), a leading provider of product development technology and services, is pleased to announce a partnership with Formlabs. This partnership allows EAC to bring professional quality SLA 3D printers and materials to commercial product development and education customers.

Burnsville, MN – May 5, 2016 — EAC Product Development Solutions (EAC) brings desktop SLA 3D printing to commercial customers through strategic partnership with Formlabs.

EAC has signed a partnership agreement to become a North American Channel Reseller for Formlabs. They will offer commercial, discrete manufacturing, and education customers the full line of Formlabs products. This partnership addresses increasing market demand for accessible additive manufacturing and rapid prototyping solutions. The Form 2 3D Printer will allow EAC’s customers to insert high-quality stereolithography (SLA) prototyping into their engineering and design workflows, for a fraction of the cost of competing technologies. The ability to minimize turnaround times by keeping prototyping in house is critical. Especially today, when development costs are scrutinized and time-to-market is more important than ever.

“We use the Form 2 to bring additional value to our engineering services engagements. I’m excited to bring the technology directly to our customers and look forward to sharing the knowledge we’ve acquired. These printers should be on the desk of every engineer. They have the potential to dramatically shorten design cycles and increase innovation. It’s amazing what happens when you enable an engineer to get their hands on a design idea.” — Allen Caldwell, senior mechanical engineer at EAC Product Development Solutions

Thane Hathaway, President and CEO of EAC said: “I built this company with a mission; to transform the way companies design, manufacture, connect to, and service their products. Additive Manufacturing, or 3D Printing, is a transformative technology that’s changing the way organizations approach product development. The Formlabs printers and materials offer professional quality 3D printing at an incredible price point. I look forward to this partnership and helping our education and commercial customers embrace this technology.”

“With decades of experience, EAC pairs deep product development expertise with a strong background in technical design. This distinct expertise will accelerate Formlabs’ efforts in bringing accessible, powerful desktop 3D printing to the millions of professional engineers and designers worldwide.” – Luke Winston, head of sales and customer success at Formlabs.

About EAC:
EAC Product Development Solutions transforms the way companies design, manufacture, connect to, and service their products. For more than 20 years they have provided the services and technologies needed to innovate, optimize, and win in the complex and competitive world of product development.

About Formlabs:
Formlabs designs and manufactures powerful and accessible 3D printing systems for engineers, designers, and artists. Their flagship product, the Form 2 3D Printer, uses stereolithography (SLA) to create high-resolution physical objects from digital designs. The company was founded in 2012 by a team of engineers and designers from the MIT Media Lab and Center for Bits and Atoms. With its powerful, intuitive, and affordable machines, Formlabs is establishing a new benchmark in professional desktop 3D printing. Formlabs also develops its own suite of high-performance materials for 3D printing, as well as best-in-class 3D-printing software.

Product development can be time consuming, difficult to manage, and slow to get up and running. Luckily, EAC Engineering Services is here to help transform the way you design your products. We offer a number of services to help you reduce time-to-market and improve project management to complete more projects. We can help with everything from customized mentoring to acting as your entire engineering team.

Milestone AV Technologies was in a position in which engineering resources were being fully utilized on active projects but they needed to make progress on a project that had been prototyped but stalled for nearly a year. Their solution? Find a trusted partner to deliver a thorough and mature design.

Milestone AV Technologies selected EAC as their trusted partner to deliver engineering and design services as well as manage the project.

Mike Ardito, Director of Product Development at Milestone AV Technologies said that in the little amount of time EAC Design Engineers worked on the project, they advanced it significantly. The level of maturity in the design exceeded his expectations.

“The first thing that was really evident when we started [working together] was that [EAC’s Design Engineer] was being very diligent from an engineering standpoint. We set up weekly meetings to check in, to give guidance, see what he was doing, and answer questions. It was clear that he was doing a lot of upfront work that would inform the design later. The engineering rigor and the quality of engineering work and the technical work, I got the impression was very good and the diligence was very high.”

Milestone needed to maintain critical client relationships by completing the project on-time and within budget. Leveraging the partnership with EAC allowed them to do exactly that. The project was completed on-time and within 10% of budget.

Like many companies, Milestone prefers to keep project work internal. However, if the opportunity presented itself, Ardito said he would have no issues coming back to EAC to based on his first experience with EAC.

Ardito explained that they look to outside design firms because they don’t have the internal resources available to manage the project but still want to move forward with it. He said “the worst possible case would be to go to somebody to do the external work and then have to spend a lot on internal resources managing that work.” He also explained that working with EAC, he was comfortable because he knew the project was in good hands and he would receive a quality output.

It was the first time Milestone AV Technologies reached out to another design firm in over a year. Ardito said, “The most valuable part of partnering with EAC goes back to having faith very early on that the technical rigor and detail was being addressed. I was assured that the EAC team was going to do the diligence necessary to create a good design.”

Milestone AV Technologies was able to complete a critical project 40% (8 months) faster by leveraging EAC’s Engineering Services group. Ardito explained that realistically, due to their workload they wouldn’t have been able to work on this project until the first quarter of 2016; EAC was able to deliver this project to them in October of 2015.

Ardito’s final comment was, “The level of service [EAC] provided, in terms of being available, the amount of attention EAC gave to the project before, during, and after was very good. It wasn’t the kind of thing where ‘we won this contract so we’re going to slap it out and not really follow up and make sure the customer is happy.’ It was just the right way to do business.”

When is PDSA season?
We all know when it’s cold and flu season and what precautions to take to get back to health or at least dial down the symptoms. However, do we recognize when it’s time to conduct a Product Development System Assessment (PDSA) to get our organization back to health?

To analogize a real life situation, if someone is sick and goes to the doctor, the doctor would want to treat the immediate sickness and then propose a physical to determine what else is going on within the patient’s body. The doctor then sets a diagnosis for continuous improvement of health. A PDSA lends itself to something close to this from a product development standpoint.

An organization must first acknowledge a problem from a department stakeholder (i.e: Vice President, Director, Manager). They must obtain an understanding of how this problem effects downstream departments and create a sense of urgency that this one problem, is only one problem, and more problems are likely to be a major inhibitor to reaching goals.

Sure, organizations can operate with these inefficiencies and still make products, but we want them to know that they could make even more products or run more projects by taking part in a PDSA, which is when we come in to align an organization’s goals and measure achievement recognition through a secure and obtainable continuous improvement plan. PDSA’s are our way of measuring an organizations pain in their processes and providing a long-term solution to provide continuous improvement and maintain a healthy organization.

PDSA’s are the only way for EAC to truly understand the heartbeat of a company and the only way a customer or prospect can become a partner. Their goals become our goals for that organization.

Why would you want a PDSA?

PDSA’s are valuable for two reasons. First we, EAC, help clients to see their product development operation as a system which is a critical first step in making the operation better (i.e. more systematic).  Secondly, we provide, as the output of the assessment, a set of high leverage improvement initiatives that will directly lead to increased productivity of their product development system.

Organizations may know something is not right with their product development operation – maybe for instance due to the number of recurring fires they fight – but they don’t know where to focus their improvement initiatives until they learn to see their operation as a system as opposed to a process.

The PDSA aligns a company’s business strategies and objectives to product development initiatives to determine areas of improvement. This is so valuable to be able to motivate a company or the internal champion to see how an improvement to a product development system would be tied to or contribute to a portion of the company’s objectives.

For example, an organizations objective or value opportunity is to reduce product development cost. Then we would streamline the product development system by making sure the people, process, and technology within a product development process are all working together without disrupting another part of the product development process thus taking waste out of the system enables reduction in cost.

During a PDSA, we engage with multifunctional groups within a company to extract process information and where waste is.  Over and above that, a continuous improvement strategy will be set in place for the company to achieve the desired state or desired maturity level. Without an investment in continuous improvement, a one-time fix to a process or system will not sustain in the long term.

What’s so great about PDSA’s?

PDSA’s are learning events and EAC consultants learn something new with every PDSA because of the uniqueness of each client we work with. Beyond spreading our understanding of seeing operations as systems, it is exciting to be able to learn the details of the client’s operations and then provide critical improvement information.

The ability to tell an internal champion or the economic buyer that their organization is “leaking oil” or specifically being able to quantify to them the dollars being wasted, and that we, EAC are here to help reduce that and get them in a better state excites me. The ability to whiteboard the organizations processes and ask them why they would perform a certain task in that fashion. The ability to ask the tough questions, like “what is the biggest headache or challenge they have right now?” and “what is working well for you?” The ability to help the champion to present to their executive board is what is rewarding in the end.

We live and breathe to make a difference for our customers. PDSA’s are a mental marathon that test every part of a person’s attention to detail, savvy, note taking, and overall listening abilities. The challenge is what we get revved up for. We never know what we are going to find.

Today we talk about the fifth and final system archetype we’ll cover in this series — The Tragedy of the Commons. It is a system that starts with independent and rational behavior, but it leads to a disaster. It starts with a shared resource with a number of individuals sharing this same resource. Each individual tries to optimize the use of the resource to his or her best advantage. That is to say, to grow their use of the resource. The individual that grows the use of their resource captures 100% of the benefit of the resource, but the cost of the resource is shared amongst all of the people that use the resource. That 100% of the gain and only a small portion of the cost drives increasing use of the resource and sometimes leads to the resource being overused.

Here is a related example – if you go to a restaurant with three of your friends and, to make things easier, you decide ahead of time that you’re just going to split the tab 4 ways. When this happens you’re likely to consume more food and drink than if you were picking up your own tab because you want to make sure you’re not being cheated. So this use of a common shared resource drives increasing utilization.

The growth of every individual’s use of a common resource ends up abusing the resource and the resource, if it’s a renewable resource, the resource can be destroyed. It’s the problem of overgrazing, overfishing of the oceans, the behavior that lead to the elimination of all the trees on Easter Island.

In non-renewable resource situations you have overburdening of the shared resource. This overburdening, as we learn from Don Reinertsen in queuing theory, can lead to a decrease in efficiency and availability of the resource.

In product development, if we look to engineering as a shared resource, we see that we have a lot of people using this resource somewhat independently. You have marketing making requirements, you have the executive team, you have manufacturing that has needs that are brought to engineering, and customer support also gives input to engineering addressing market issues. Each of these resources looks to optimize the use of the resource and this drives the system archetype of the Tragedy of the Commons where engineering ends up being overburdened and as queuing theory says it’s efficiency drops off dramatically.

The antidote for the Tragedy of the Commons system is simply management of the resource. Instead of letting everyone operate it independently it’s to put a management system in place that doles out access to the resource. In product development or engineering this management takes the form of a single queue for engineering requests, clearly defining engineering requirements and requests, and prioritization of all the requests that come engineering sot he most important tasks are getting the available resources and the resources are not taxed or overburdened. The interesting thing to me is that these three management antidotes to the problem of the shared resource of engineering are the three practices — engineering requests, requirements management, and prioritization — are core to an Agile product development system that EAC promotes that is finding increased usage and utilization even in hardware and systems engineering organizations.

Contact us to learn more about how Systems Thinking and the application of our Product Development Operating System can help your organization become more efficient, productive, innovative, and competitive. Follow us at http://www.twitter.com/systhinking