The Digital Factory - Episode 11: How Jabil Circuit Adopts New Manufacturing Technologies with John Dulchinos

Episode 11: How Jabil Circuit Adopts New Manufacturing Technologies with John Dulchinos

09/20/18 • 31 min

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

Previous Episode

Episode 10: CAD in the cloud with Jon Hirschtick

Computer aided design, or CAD, has followed the arc of computing over the last 50 years: the first CAD programs were command-line applications that ran on mainframes, which gave way to graphical software that ran on desktop PCs. The next generation of CAD software can run almost anywhere, including in a Web browser or on a phone. As CAD becomes available on every platform, it’s changing the way that engineers and designers work by bringing more people into contact with CAD and by making handoffs between teams more fluid.

In this episode of the Digital Factory Podcast, Jon Bruner talks with Jon Hirschtick, the co-founder and CEO of Onshape, a six-year-old company developing a CAD platform that’s entirely cloud-based. (You might also know Hirschtick as the co-founder of SolidWorks, a pioneer in bringing CAD from mainframes to desktop computers.)

Links from this episode:
– Onshape
– The Uni-ball Pure Malt 4-color pen, Jon Hirschtick’s favorite tool, which he uses to write in his Shinola journal notebook.

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

Next Episode

Episode 12: Spencer Wright on IMTS

This week we present three conversations from IMTS, the giant manufacturing technology trade show that comes to Chicago every other year. In this episode we speak with Spencer Wright, author of The Prepared and head of partnerships at nTopology. He's an authority on 3D printing, so he's able to make sense of the enormous range of 3D printing processes and machines that appeared at IMTS this year.

Be sure to listen to the other two episodes in this series, #13 featuring Inventables CEO Zach Kaplan, and #14 with Elizabeth Koprucki from the University of Chicago's fab lab.

Visit http://bit.ly/2ImRLKo to see links and background for this episode.