The Digital Factory

The 3D printers at Align Technology turn out half a million parts every day—an exceptional scale that makes the company the largest user of 3D printing in the world.

But, as lots of companies have learned, installing a 3D printing capability is only the first step toward digital production. Align’s massive, custom-built additive production line is part of a digital workflow that begins when a patient’s mouth is scanned and incorporates generative design, deep learning, and lots of automation.

In this episode Jon Bruner speaks with Emory Wright, Senior Vice President for Global Operations at Align. Joe Hogan, Align's CEO, is speaking at the Digital Factory Conference on May 7, alongside other CEOs, CTOs, and CIOs who are transforming their businesses through manufacturing. Visit https://www.thedigitalfactory.com to see the program and register.

Visit http://bit.ly/2UoaMjV for full episode notes and links.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, offers a striking catalog of reference materials that includes peanut butter, New Jersey soil, domestic sludge, Lake Michigan fish tissue, and Spam. These materials turn out to illuminate the fascinating process by which measurement standards are defined in terms of fundamental physical constants and then handed down by NIST as artifacts that anyone can use to calibrate a bathroom scale or detect impurities in molybdenum oxide.

In this episode Jon Bruner interviews Steven Choquette, director of NIST's Office of Reference Materials, about the 1,300 materials that NIST's scientists produce and certify, and about the future of the program in biological materials.

Visit http://bit.ly/nistsrm for full episode notes and links. And visit https://www.thedigitalfactory.com to learn more about The Digital Factory Conference, returning to Boston on May 7, 2019. Register to join CEOs, CTOs, and CIOs who are transforming their businesses through manufacturing.

It’s difficult to sell new technologies to big manufacturers. If you’ve got a novel way to build things and a fresh startup to market it, you’ll run into all sorts of obstacles: established industrial companies tend to be risk-averse, top-down organizations with long replacement cycles and highly specific requirements. Many industrial startups generate lots of interest but starve as they trek through long sales cycles.

Dayna Grayson sees that changing. She’s a partner at NEA who has invested in several next-generation manufacturing startups, including Formlabs, Desktop Metal, Onshape, and Upskill, and she points to three major shifts that have made manufacturing a compelling sector for startups to address.

Visit http://bit.ly/2Xco9WR for full episode notes and links. And visit https://www.thedigitalfactory.com/ to learn more about The Digital Factory Conference, returning to Boston on May 7, 2019. Dayna Grayson will speak along with CEOs, CTOs, and CIOs who are transforming their businesses through manufacturing.

The Digital Factory Conference, our advanced-manufacturing leadership summit, is coming back to Boston on May 7. This year it’s got a new co-host: Jeff Immelt, who spent 16 years as CEO of GE and is now, among other roles, a partner at NEA. Visit https://thedigitalfactory.com/ to learn more about the conference.

This episode of the Digital Factory Podcast features a wide-ranging conversation between Jeff and Jon Bruner about digital transformation in manufacturing. In his investing, Jeff focuses on what he calls the “Four A’s:” artificial intelligence, automation, analytics, and additive manufacturing. Not only will those technologies improve overall manufacturing productivity, they also promise to introduce new capabilities that can drive transformative business models, like mass customization, machine-as-a-service, and rapid product development.

For full episode notes, visit http://bit.ly/2HHHwTZ.

Jabil Circuit is a $20 billion contract manufacturer that produces everything from specialized medical devices to mobile phone accessories. Since Jabil doesn’t own any of the brands that roll off its lines, the company’s entire value is in its ability to spin up multitudes of new manufacturing processes that meet new requirements from its clients.

In this episode of the Digital Factory Podcast, Jon Bruner speaks with John Dulchinos, Jabil’s Vice President of Digital Manufacturing. He’s responsible for evaluating new manufacturing technologies and finding ways to apply them in Jabil’s supply chain, and he’s got hard numbers and real experience with many technologies that are still in their infancies.

Dulchinos is featured in The Digital Factory Report, an overview of recent advances in artificial intelligence, additive manufacturing, and advanced automation, and a look at how those technologies are transforming the business of making things. Download the report for free and watch Dulchinos’ presentation from the Digital Factory Conference at https://digitalfactory.xyz/.

In this episode:
– The importance of ‘thinking big, starting small, failing fast’
– Strategy for scaling a new technology from prototyping into production
– The surprising cost-effectiveness of 3D printing: it used to be cheaper than injection molding for runs under 500-1,000 units, but the field has advanced so much that it’s now cheaper than injection molding for some runs up to 30,000 or 40,000 units
– Dulchinos’ current focus areas: additive manufacturing, new forms of robotics and automation, and interconnection between tools and factories
– Dulchinos’ favorite tools: Henckels kitchen knives

Read more on the Formlabs blog:
http://bit.ly/2NkxMSa