Most headhunters might assume that an executive with more than a decade in the agricultural industry has little to offer a leading provider of 3D-printing solutions. If the applicant is Yoav Zeif, CEO of Minneapolis-based Stratasys, those experts would be wrong.
Zeif begins the discussion by reiterating what many in the additive manufacturing (AM) community have long known: Printing is all about the materials. It’s a topic he’s quite comfortable with, albeit in a manner that is not at first obvious. “I have extensive experience in precision agriculture,” Zeif says. “That means using smart technology to ensure that you grow plants with the optimal amount of water and fertilizers that have been developed according to their unique needs rather than the traditional method of throwing broad spectrum chemicals on everything.”
Yes, the legacy approach might grow bountiful crops, but it also tends to toxify our air and water supplies, Zeif explains. By leveraging sensors, satellites and intelligent chemical formulations, he and his colleagues at ADAMA Agricultural Solutions and Netafim in Tel Aviv developed digital-farming solutions that allow the industry to produce more with less.
Since joining Stratasys in early 2020, Zeif has conveyed a similar message to the company’s 2,000+ employees. Here again, what does agriculture have to do with AM? Plenty. As with fertilizers and herbicides, the properties and usability of the polymers, resins and composite materials used in 3D printing are wholly dependent on their chemical makeup. Zeif applies this same logic to AM, noting that “now more than ever, material and software development is key, and if we as a solution provider focus only on the machines, we will go nowhere.”
Similarities exist on the manufacturing side as well. “I was responsible for manufacturing at each of those companies and experienced firsthand the many challenges that come with high-volume production,” Zeif says. “Like many others, we were making huge CapEx investments into tooling and plastic injection-molding equipment, and while this manufacturing process is very efficient and mature, it’s also quite limited in terms of flexibility.”
So it was with the parts upon leaving the molding department, where Zeif’s direct reports oversaw teams of hundreds of people assembling emitters, drip nozzles, electrical connectors and control systems. Many of these components came from China to six factories in Israel, with completed units shipping from there to environmentally conscious growers in South America, India and California.
As with the injection-molding process, Zeif found these manual assembly methods to be limited and inefficient. “And look at the shipping,” he laments. “Why not print the parts near the customers and eliminate the huge carbon footprint incurred when sending products by air, sea and land to international destinations? That’s why I jumped on the opportunity with Stratasys. More than any of us have yet realized, additive manufacturing can and will be a game-changer for the environment.”
There’s a long way to go. AM still represents less than 0.1% of the world’s overall manufacturing output, Zeif points out, a figure he suggests is embarrassing if you stop to compare the relative merits of additive and subtractive manufacturing.
In his pre-Stratasys, traditional-production life, Zeif dealt with all the problems just described and more. For example, molds from suppliers in Switzerland often needed a year or more for delivery, testing and first article inspection. Taking designs from research and development to the factory floor was a similarly glacial process. And decisions to invest in additional extruders required extensive workflow analyses and feasibility studies, followed by no small amount of second-guessing.
By comparison, 3D printing offers greater flexibility, faster development cycles, minimal tooling costs and a significantly smaller environmental impact. Why, then, is its current adoption as a mainstream manufacturing process so anemic?
That’s exactly the question Zeif says he asked himself four years ago. He now has a simple explanation: “The AM industry doesn’t have a mass production mindset.”
AM is a child of rapid prototyping, Zeif says, noting that design engineers have long had different priorities and targets than those gearing up to produce millions of parts. Designers and their r&d counterparts have the freedom to experiment with various materials and geometries. Product performance is not a high priority at this stage because there’s time to refine designs and processes further down the line.
Risks are also less worrisome, as are the economics of only making a few dozen components. Having a digital thread from design to delivery isn’t necessarily vital, and even questions over the total cost of ownership or whether a complete workflow exists become less crucial.
“We’ve been allowed to adopt this more laid-back approach because there has always been a steady demand for prototyping,” Zeif says. “We gave everyone a printer and said, ‘Here, this is a miracle. Enjoy it.’ And while that might work in the prototype and low-volume space, it doesn’t fly beyond that.”
Manufacturers today want connectivity. They want a complete solution, one that fits into their workflows, as well as delivers an attractive cost per part and a total cost of ownership that makes sense.
“That’s what you build your business model around when managing a factory,” Zeif says. “It’s not rocket science, but it is something that we as 3D-printing providers must strive to deliver.”
Accurate, dependable parts are a must. Given Zeif’s background in chemistry, it’s no wonder that he emphasizes the criticality of robust material development in meeting this goal. Printed parts are expected to provide the same level of quality and performance as those that are machined or injection molded, he stresses, with comparable surface finishes, adherence to dimensional tolerances and a range of attributes, including high tensile and impact strength, elongation, creep resistance and other mechanical properties.
And while “materials are everything in 3D printing,” Zeif also warns that software’s role in AM’s continued growth shouldn’t be discounted. “When I use the term workflow, I mean everything from the ability to design and prototype parts to transitioning those designs into production.”
“But it goes further than that. Manufacturers want to track inventory, gather quality and production data, and have the capacity to connect with the customer, which in many cases includes meeting service level agreements,” he continues. “Each application, whether medical, aerospace or otherwise, has a unique workflow, and manufacturers are beginning to demand a comprehensive, secure set of tools that addresses all this and more.”
Considering Stratasys’ long history as a “polymer-printing-only” company, not to mention Zeif’s own lengthy experience with plastic injection molding, the announcement earlier this year that Stratasys is acquiring binder-jet provider Desktop Metal might have come as a surprise to many.
If you’ve followed along thus far, however, you’ll quickly realize that Zeif wants to see 3D printing represent far more of the manufacturing landscape than the current (and paltry) 0.1% threshold mentioned earlier. To do that requires a strong presence in metals.
“We decided to incorporate metal into our offerings based on our customers’ demands and the growing requests from our partners,” Zeif says. “So when considering which metal solution would be best, we concluded that laser-powder-bed fusion might be a great technology, but it will never be suitable for mass production. For that, we needed a comprehensive solution, and Desktop Metal, with its innovative approach to metal binder jet, is best positioned to achieve mass production. So that’s our vision. We have to transition this industry from prototyping to scale manufacturing, and this move was part of that strategy.”
Consider Zeif’s earlier statement about printing parts near customers. Great idea, but doing so will require all that he’s described and one other thing: high-level consistency.
Just as a widget machined in Atlanta will (or should) be identical in all ways to one machined in Shanghai or Mexico City, so it is with 3D printing. “Everything about the process—from the metal or polymer feedstock to the build parameters to the sintering and post-processing—everything must be reliable and consistent,” Zeif says. “If so, the first part and the thousandth or ten thousandth part will be the same, no matter where or when it was produced.
“This is my vision for additive manufacturing,” he adds. “Stratasys and its competitors need to examine the total cost of ownership, part performance and the entire workflow, including product support, application advice, risk considerations, such as cybersecurity, and everything else that goes into manufacturing, whatever the production quantity. If we don’t adopt this mindset, we won’t make it in the industry and we’ll certainly never gain the market share that 3D printing deserves.”
