The premise and promise of additive manufacturing

YOMI MAKANJUOLA, PhD

Yomi Makanjuola, who has joined Business a.m.’s board of elite contributors from the United Kingdom, earned a doctorate in Materials Engineering & Design and worked primarily at Accenture as an Associate Partner in Nigeria. Currently, he is a private management consultant and author in the UK. His most recent book is Nigeria Like A Rolling Stone, now available at https://amzn.eu/d/8SRPZ0n. He can be reached at 9yoma9@gmail.com 

In a conventional duel with Goliath, David was the prohibitive underdog. After declining King Saul’s personal armour, the outmatched but unfazed shepherd morphed into an instant hero. “Floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee,” David dispatched two megalomaniacs with one stone. First up was the Philistine, but the same kinetic pebble inside the blowhard’s skull figuratively dislodged the king’s crown.

While David’s unerring chutzpah turned the tide against a strutting giant, levelling the playing field by fiat is now a feature of social correctness, typified by recreational sports such as golf and road running. A golf handicap is the number of strokes a casual player is allowed to deduct to arrive at a net score, relative to more accomplished golfers. Likewise, in a handicap race, slower participants start first followed at intervals by faster runners, thus giving everybody a symbolic shot at winning.

Besides these storied and contemporary scenarios, does technology offer a parallel insight? Here’s one. Before the turn of the century, Nigeria – like many developing countries – had meagre teledensity and a hopelessly underdeveloped telecommunications industry. In short order, wireless technology enabled poorer economies to leapfrog capital-intensive cable infrastructure with cellular base stations.

From a much broader perspective, human proclivity seeks out value whenever and wherever possible. As such, the farmer in a remote African village with access to a mobile network is a beneficiary of a sophisticated value chain. However, faced with a broken axle – or, worse, a knocked tractor engine – that same farmer could become a casualty of an inaccessible supply chain. In a networked and consumer-driven world, virtually everyone is now a data point or node in a web of intricate value chains, within and beyond national borders.

Over time, globalisation facilitated the production, assembly and distribution of goods – ranging from paper clips to motor vehicles – that benefited from economies of scale. Unfortunately, technologically backward nations were left at the margins. Unable to fabricate precision-engineered spare parts for factories, machine tools and equipment, and myriad hardware, workers in developing countries remain threadbare and less productive than they could otherwise be.

Classically, the manufacturing process entails product prototyping, injection moulding, and mass production along an assembly line. Doubtless, large-scale production drives down unit costs, but it is also a subtractive, hence wasteful, energy-intensive process. However, there has emerged a new paradigm on the block, in the shape of additive manufacturing (AM) or three-dimensional printing (3DP) technology, based on computer-generated design. As this technology has matured, the old “leapfrog” chestnut is being widely touted. According to obsessive optimists, this could empower multitudes of formerly handicapped underdogs in less-developed economies.

Tellingly, at the heart of AM is digital technology aided by computer software and telecommunications networks. Although it blossomed among hobbyists and enthusiasts, though constrained by affordability and printer size, AM has metamorphosed commercially. The distinctive feature is flexibility, and the notion that, pragmatically, “if you can design it, then you can make it.”

In theory and practice, product design files can be shared electronically and “printed” on demand. In contrast to stereotyped manufacturing, which requires costly setup and retooling, AM operates on the basis of bonding together molten layers of additives like metal, nylon, resin, plastics and ceramic, thus engendering a personalised and versatile production process. Decidedly, a high-grade and sturdy 3D printer accounts for the lion share of startup costs. Large inventories are unnecessary, aside from printer accessories and printing supplies.

In the past, the main barrier to entry was the cost of 3D printers. More recently, printers costing in the low triple-digit dollar range are now widely available. Rather than relying on imports, AM will allow small and medium-scale enterprises in developing nations to form manufacturing hubs near their customers. Also, rural cottage shops can benefit from spare parts production, thus enabling that hypothetical farmer to replace his broken axle more swiftly.

In the Global South, commercial infrastructure that supports intensive manufacturing, logistics and efficient transportation is a rarity. Nevertheless, it should be reiterated ad infinitum that errant governments, like Nigeria’s, require strategic foresight to ensure electricity reliability and resilience. Digital manufacturing involves minimal state intervention beyond ensuring good public services and socioeconomic stability. Thereafter, the government should simply get out of the way of budding entrepreneurs.

Presently, the industries benefiting from AM range from aerospace, automobile, tool-making, to housing. But its impact in the fabrication of medical and dental devices, such as prosthetic limbs and dentures, at the point of need has been massive. Slowly but surely, layer by layer, AM constitutes a catalyst for private enterprise, job creation and economic revitalisation in local communities, even as geopolitical vagaries and debt burdens imperil global trade. 

Unlike David, 3DP is not a giant-killing technology aiming a silver bullet at mass production. In the spirit of live and let live (which has eluded Goliath’s Gaza Strip lineage to this day), additive manufacturing is a metaphorical throwback to the make-it-yourself blacksmith ethos. For today’s economic underclass, it affords a short learning curve with the promise of a favourable return on individual creativity.

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