“Prototyping” is nothing new to the Manufacturing Industry. Its a standard way of working, and in existence from early days of the industry, decades ago. Nevertheless, the manufacturing prototyping lifecycle has been long and slow, due to many restrictions like dependency on tooling, material, design, etc.

Industry has evolved multi-fold over these years, going through Industry_2.0-> 3.0->and now Industry_4.0. There are great product development ideas, along with them comes the time sensitivity. “Today’s industry caters to an absolutely time-sensitive user-base. All businesses and individuals are competing for the faster ‘time-to-market”.

That’s where the notion of “Rapid Prototyping” appears. Its a simple notion of developing & testing the prototypes in iterative manner, taking user feedback, calibrating the design to achieve optimal product, at a faster pace. Rapid Prototyping also provide a high degree of “Flexibility and Simplicity”.

By rapidly prototyping, software industry has gained a significant advancement in terms of quality, innovation, novelty, and to a great extent, customer satisfaction. Software buzzwords of yesterday (Agile, DevOps, Automation, AI, Low Code/No Code, etc.) are reality today.

Many efforts have been made, and companies have achieved a lot to make this “Prototyping Process” faster. But the clear winner in the entire manufacturing ecosystem, comes out to be “3D Printing, or Additive Manufacturing”. Sheer simplicity of the process, no dependence on special / custom tools, and availability of variety of material, along with flexibility to play around with the design and scale, the 3d printed way of prototyping the products has been a blessing to the manufacturing process, and it clearly a “Rapid Prototyping” enabler.

As soon as the product design is created on a computer, the 3D printer and its robotic arms can come into action in no time, to give birth to the baby, the 3d printed part that our guys can touch and feel in a few hours of designing, contrary to the days’ time-frame in case of traditional manufacturing.

Many big and small organizations are already using 3D printers on their shop floor, in their R&D units, at their customer service centers, or in training and development units. and these 3d printers are present in various formats — plastic printing, metal printing, resin printing, fiber, composite, and what not. The list is growing and growing.

For instance, a vehicle manufacturer has employed 3d printers at their shop floor, that provide simplicity and flexibility to their workforce, to innovate and with tooling. Yes tooling, which makes or breaks a final product, and also takes an important role in vehicle assembly. So these shop floor guys now have full freedom to create their own tool design, or customize the existing tools, with an aim to improve their productivity. The bright side is that, this process cuts down the dependency on R& D to work on tooling innovation, and the end users (the shop floor workers) are empowered to contribute significantly in design process, which is very rare for a rather well organized manufacturing industry. This is in a way design thinking, which gives push to the MANUFACTURING RAPID PROTOTYPING.

Until then…