Should You Offer 3D Printing Services?

3D printing is a hot topic, and there is a lot of speculation that 3D is a sales opportunity that quick and commercial printers ought to pursue. But is it? Who’s actually doing it? Are they making money with it? Here is a look at the issues.

1. 3D printing has a low barrier to entry.

From a technology perspective, 3D printing is an inexpensive market to get into. You can buy an entry-level production machine for a few thousand dollars. Plug it in to your network and print to it like you would any other device.

Traditional 3D hardware manufacturers include 3D Systems, MCor, and Stratasys. However, we are starting to see names more familiar to industry entering this market, as well. Last year, Roland DGA introduced its monoFab ARM-10. In October, HP unveiled its much-anticipated Multi Jet Fusion, although the Multi Jet is not expected to be commercially available until 2016.

As lower priced machines have started to come available, we are seeing print shops purchasing low- and mid-range production printers, even if it is simply to investigate the opportunities.

Among them is Hudson Printing (Salt Lake City, UT). It purchased a two-color Cubex Duo with 10x10” printing area last year. The Cubex became part of the Print Lab, Hudson Printing’s in-house R&D area.

At the time of the purchase, Hudson Printing tasked its Indigo operator and lead IT specialist with managing the process. “We had a budget of $5,000, and the idea was to keep the Cubex printing so we could keep learning,” says Paul Gardner, director of innovation for Hudson Printing. “But some of these projects take up to 40 hours each, and frankly, we were struggling to keep it printing more than 5-10 things per week.”

Today, Hudson Printing is focusing more on the overall reinvention of its business and it has reduced its focus on 3D printing.

FASTSIGNS is another company that invested in 3D printing as a learning exercise. The franchise prides itself on being on the cutting edge of technology and purchased Stratasys uPrints for three test locations: San Diego, Milwaukee, and Chicago.

Victoria Crane, owner of the FASTSIGNS of San Diego - Mira Mesa, loves the technology focus, even if she is still striving to find the fit. (Many beta testers in the B2B space are finding that one of the challenges is how to position themselves in the space. Shops like The UPS Store have the benefit of a retail storefront that draws in traffic. B2B locations, however, must initiate those conversations with clients.)

“There are other companies, especially in the retail space, that are out there testing, with mostly hobbyists as clients,” Crane says. “Our focus is mainly on business to business sales. We can provide quality that is unmatched by home 3D printers and can take ideas from entrepreneurs and larger companies alike to create 3D-printed prototypes and complex models.”

2. Can money be made without design expertise?

Technically, if all you do is offer 3D output services, you do not need to have design expertise. As long as the file is printable, you can output to your device. Errors in the file will be caught at the RIP, and if necessary, the file can be sent back to the client to be fixed. The question is how many customers will bring you printable files that require no fixes or that have the expertise to fix them if they do.

That is why when Burke Jones, owner of The UPS Store in Kearny Mesa, CA, began testing the Stratysys uPrint, he hired an independent contractor to handle the 3D design. “You can’t print a file you don’t have,” he says.

3D scanners and software are getting better and easier to use, which helps during the design process, but the question remains, if there is an error in the file, who fixes it?

“Even getting a perfect CAD file or STL file doesn’t tell the whole story,” says Hiroshi Ono, group product manager, specialty products of Roland DGA, manufacturer of the monoFab ARM-10 3D. “ Complex parts or shapes will still require expertise from the operator to optimize the support structure or the printing orientation. Software is getting more user friendly, but there are still things you try to do, even with the knowledge, and the file fails because there are a lot of variables in there.”

In the world of commercial print, fixes are handled by the prepress department. From a client perspective, there is a reasonable expectation that, when it comes to 3D files, it would be much the same. The question printers must wrestle with is, if they do not have the expertise to fix errors in a 3D file, where is the value to the client?

For more complex projects, this means hiring (or contracting with) the right people, not just having hobbyists on staff.

3. Industrial rapid prototyping is a saturated market.

When we hear about 3D printing, we most commonly hear about rapid prototyping and 3D modeling. Indeed, according to Ibis, this is nearly a $500 million market, growing at a rate of 22.6% per year. But rapid prototyping is also a mature and saturated market. 3D service bureaus and well-established online providers have been serving it for years. The change is coming, not in the ability to use 3D printing to do rapid prototyping, but in cost reductions that allow small and mid-sized manufacturers to bring this technology in-house.

Because the rapid prototyping market is already being served, some believe that for printers, the opportunity lies in the ability to create truly unique projects. Jim Corliss of Braintree Printing, for example, which invested in a Dimension 1200es 3D printer by Stratysys last year, was intrigued by an opportunity to print replicas of body parts to be used for medical litigation. More recently, he produced a unique ping-pong paddle with a chess piece handle for a testimonial dinner for a company whose president was a ping-pong and chess fanatic.

“It’s great technology, but rapid prototyping is already being serviced by online vendors like Red Laser that are well entrenched,” he says. “To get into 3D successfully, you have to explore alternative, nontraditional uses. You have to put on an entrepreneurial hat.”

Roger Buck, marketing director for The Flesh Company, recounts the story of a colleague who did just that.

“He had a kid on staff who did CAD,” says Buck. “He’d come up with ideas, and if clients liked it, he’d make a mold. The day I was there, he was printing a miniature toilet bowl that was fully operational. He said, ‘I thought about it this morning. You put a shot of tequila in the tank and the waitress goes around asking, “Would you like to get ‘s--t faced?”’ By 4 PM, he’s showing me a working prototype and he was on his way out to hit the bars that night.”

4. Different customer bases

Another challenge, printers are finding, is that that commercial printing and rapid prototyping are handled by different areas of a client’s business. This makes crossover from one area of the business into the other more difficult. “3D is purchased by the engineering people,” says Corliss. “There is not a lot of overlap with the people buying printing industry services—namely corporate communications, whether the HR department, marketing, or training. There is not a lot of synergy with the corporate communications world.”

5. Consumer market

Much has been made of the ability to use 3D printing to service consumer and entrepreneurial needs, open new markets, and create new products and services. Here is where quick printers’ retail storefronts have an advantage over commercial printers. A 3D printer in the lobby, churning away on client projects, is great advertising and certainly is a conversation starter.

The challenge is that not everyone who has a 3D project is going to help you turn a profit. The UPS Store (Kearny Mesa) received a tremendous boost for its 3D business after it was profiled by Forbes.com last year. The combination of the storefront, the trusted UPS Store brand, and the national publicity helped boost volumes significantly, but Jones found that lots of interest doesn’t necessarily translate into big revenues. “From a customer service perspective, it was a black hole in terms of time,” he says.

6. Slow speeds and multiple machines

Other issues? The technology is slow, so one machine can only handle so much business. There are built-in limitations on the volumes you can produce. “The device we bought has 1/100” build resolution,” says Corliss of Braintree Printing. “To produce something that is 1” tall requires 100 passes. That’s the equivalent of printing 100 posters.”

(The HP Multi Jet Fusion is claimed to be 10 times faster than other commercially available machines, but it is yet untested in the marketplace.)

On the positive side, Corliss notes, unlike commercial presses that require human intervention, 3D presses do not. “You can hit ‘print’ on a 3D device and walk away,” he says. “Once you RIP the file to the machine, it runs unattended for hours. A lot of the stuff we’ve printed, we printed overnight.”

Shops may also need multiple machines to handle different customer needs. FDM, for example, is great for mechanical parts, but its resolution is not as high as stereo lithography. Stereo lithography has higher resolution (and is therefore better for more artistic projects), but it doesn’t offer the durability required for mechanical parts.

“Each has pros and cons and excel in different areas, so you might need to buy two or more different technologies and see what you can get out of them,” says Roland DGA’s Ono. “On the positive side, these machines are relatively inexpensive. (Roland’s monoFab ARM-10 has an MSRP of $6,995.) You don’t have spend a ton of money.”

Is It Worth the Investment?

All things taken into consideration, is 3D printing worth the investment? The jury is still out on it as a business model, but as in every area of specialty, we know there will be shops that find a niche. In the meantime, we are also hearing about shops that are using 3D printers to produce in-house parts and savings thousands of dollars doing it. That alone can justify the purchase of the device, and the fact that this expertise can be parlayed into customer work just becomes an added bonus.

The good news is that the cost of the devices remains low, which means printers can experiment with the technology with little risk.