Bees Do It

I am sure Ella Fitzgerald did not think she meant additive manufacturing, but that is a big part of what bees do.

Honeycomb map of the United States, created with the help of bees (credit Ri Ren, www.borepanda.com)

Additive manufacturing is the process of building something by adding material. Normally, manufacturing is a subtractive process, that is that material is removed, such as in milling, machining, boring, etc. Additive manufacturing is the opposite, where a product is created layer by layer. The popular name for this process these days is "3D printing".

There is a lot of interest in the subject of 3D printing these days, but the body of research is not very deep. I have been observing the hype from a skeptical distance for a few years. 3D printing has been touted as the cure for all kinds of maladies in every industry and process.

One of my issues is that many practitioners fail to see 3D printing for what it really is, a manufacturing process.

I once had to talk a DoD logistician away from the idea of using 3D printing to replace inventory items on the shelf. That is not necessarily a bad idea. However, inventory is near the end of the chain and, once we consider that we would be squeezing all the logistics elements into that one near-end point in the supply chain, it becomes obvious that the idea is more complicated than it seems. For example, quality control, training, technical documentation, who is the technical authority that certifies or qualifies the product to be introduced to the weapon system? On and on...

I would like to someday conduct finish a proper research study on the impact of 3D printing in logistics, and I have started some work on that already. My logistics instincts tell me that introducing 3D printing in the manufacturing or sourcing node of the supply chain makes the most sense initially, but we'll see where the research takes us.