Q&A with Stratasys Chief Business Unit Officer Rich Garrity on the state of standardization in 3D printing.
Ask anyone in additive manufacturing (AM) about the biggest challenges the industry is facing, and you’ll likely hear one of two issues: education or standardization.
It makes sense.
Despite its four-decade history, 3D printing is still seen as a novel technology, especially by engineers who didn’t (metaphorically) cut their teeth on desktop 3D printers in their youth.
By the same token, AM standards are relatively immature, representing only a small fraction of manufacturing standards set by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and many of those are still under development. “The progress on the standards front is slower than it should be,” says Rich Garrity, Chief Business Unit Officer at Stratasys. “We’ve heard from our customers that we need to pick up the pace.”
The silver lining is that these two issues—education and standardization—are so bound up together that making progress in one should realize improvements in the other. I’ve written a fair amount about AM education, and we’ve covered it here extensively, but the latter issue has received somewhat less attention.
I sat down with Garrity in an effort to amend that.
engineering.com: If you recall the first time you held a 3D printed part or used a 3D printer, what was your impression at the time?
Rich Garrity: Yes, that would have been in 2010, so 15 years ago.
At that time you could see the possibilities, particularly because we were in the on-demand parts business and trying to push the concept of distributed manufacturing. That’s why we started to create hubs around the world along with a digital “glue” where we could see what was going on in all these different factories, pushing jobs depending upon capacity and where demand was coming from.
So you could see, back then, the ability to impact supply chains and how companies were thinking about optimizing their supply chains by reducing their physical inventories of spare parts. I think that was really the first “aha” moment for me.
In terms of standards today, what separates additive from conventional manufacturing technologies such as CNC machining or injection molding?
Today, additive is behind those traditional technologies that have been in place for decades, but I think the additive community is working hard to catch up in order to make adoption easier. That’s a key topic for us, and Stratasys is actively involved on a number of different fronts there, including with the ASTM polymer subcommittee.
We can build a next-generation printer, but if we don’t have these other pieces in place, it’s like bringing the next train without any rails for it to run on. We need to get these rails in place for the trains to be able to run effectively.
We’ve also got our own customer advisory board made up of 14 companies, including some of the big aerospace and automotive companies, and there’s a subcommittee that’s just focused on standards and the right way to pursue them.
One of the interesting aspects of standardization is that any advancement you make is likely going to benefit other players in the same space. Does that factor into your decision making?
Absolutely, a hundred percent. As we see it, what’s good for Stratasys is good for the industry. It’s good for adoption, and it’s part of the maturity of our industry. As you know, additive has made good progress on prototyping and tooling on the shop floor, with production parts fitting into different niches. Growing those niches further from where they are today, that’s where standards and design for additive training and education all come into place.
How would you characterize the progress on standards over the last five years?
Based on what we’ve heard from our customers, we’ve shifted some resources that normally would have gone to new products, for example, to getting these other parts of the equation right. We can build a next-generation printer, but if we don’t have these other pieces in place, it’s like bringing the next train without any rails for it to run on. We need to get these rails in place for the trains to be able to run effectively.
That’s been a shift for us in the last couple of years, largely from customer input. They’ve been clear that the technology itself is good, but we still need to work on adoption, and these are the things that need to happen to spur adoption.
Are there particular challenges when it comes to standardization?
First of all, it’s getting enough stakeholders together to agree on what’s desired, because there are lots of different views on what the standards should be, especially in polymers. So we’ve been working on getting some coalescence around what the ideal should look like.
From there, it’s a matter of doing the qualification work but we’ve been doing some of that already in parallel. We have a qualified aerospace material called ULTEM, for example, and other material, Antero, is going through qualification now. The goal is to provide a solution where, if you follow the recipe, you can produce qualified production parts in aerospace.
And we’re seeing that already happening today. For example, in the Air Force there are 26 installations of our solution producing spare parts for military aircraft. It’s happening in real time. Parts are managed digitally in a secure cloud and approved. As long as bases follow the protocols, the parts are flight-ready.
The industries where additive has seen the most success—medical devices, aerospace, defense—are also some of the most highly regulated in manufacturing. Assuming that’s right, what does that imply about standardization?
AM naturally fits personalization, low-volume/high-mix spaces, weight reduction, and supply chain flexibility. At Stratasys, we’ve had to meet a lot of quality and regulatory requirements: we’re ISO 13485 for medical and AS9100 certified for aerospace.
Five years ago, we didn’t really have a lot of people in quality, but now it’s a key part of our company. It’s really the backbone to what we do because, if we don’t have the proper setup in place, we’re not going to be able to play in those spaces. At the same time, because those spaces are so highly regulated, the adoption cycles tend to be longer.
What’s encouraging is that we’ve seen a lot of success to date so far in these areas, and over the next three, five, seven years, the adoption should accelerate as the railway gets put down for us to run the trains on, so to speak. These markets are huge. The downside is it takes time to develop applications and win over risk-averse mindsets. But we’re down the tracks and have the pieces in place to accelerate. I see those as key growth areas in the coming years.
Can you comment on how standards relate to interoperability and cybersecurity?
Cybersecurity has become a growing topic for us. We’re undergoing CMMC cybersecurity certification from the DoW to operate in defense and support suppliers in that space.
It’s a big undertaking—not inexpensive, resource-intensive—and it changes how we do things to ensure that, within our on-demand parts business, those jobs are fully secure and only the right people have access. That’s been layered on top of ITAR and other long-standing requirements.
You touched on this at the beginning, but I want to drill down on the topic of supply chains a bit more. Do you see reshoring initiatives as encouraging progress in AM standards, or is a lack of standards acting as a kind of roadblock to shortening supply chains and making them more resilient?
I think it’s more the former. The tariff situation is prompting more supply chain discussions across companies. Additive enters those discussions depending on the application, and that is pushing the standards topic faster, at least in the last six months. So the market is pushing more than in previous years to move faster.
Looking ahead 5-10 years, what does the future of additive manufacturing, and AM standards in particular, look like?
Ideally, additive becomes part of every manufacturer’s toolbox. It’s not a niche. It’s not replacing traditional manufacturing except in certain niches; it complements it.
That means if you need scale, use traditional. If you need high mix, low volume, personalization, or localized spare-part replacement, that’s where additive plays. Mass adoption means additive is simply another tool you need.
Success for the industry is having those rails laid down: the standards are there and the pieces are in place to go beyond the early adopters. Despite some investor sentiment, adoption is happening and moving forward. I visit lots of customers where I see that’s what’s happening on the ground. Adoption takes time, but it’s moving in the right direction.
