3-D Printers Are Poised to Replace Mass Production with Mass Customization

you will read the following article and and answer the questions:

Both a billionaire and your Average Joe can buy a pocketknife for $10. They can also both buy an iPhone for $749. And they can both purchase a new compact car for under $15,000.

That mass affordability is the result of mass production coupled with mass sales. Marginal costs are typically quite low with mass production. So if manufacturers can tap mass markets and sell their products in large numbers, they can achieve low per-unit costs by spreading the massive fixed costs (for developing the new technologies and setting up the factories) over many units. Doing so results in economies of scale, low average total costs per unit, and low unit prices that even average folks can afford.

Mass production and mass sales first became possible during the Industrial Revolution, which began in England during the late 1700s and then spread throughout most of the rest of the world during the next two centuries. The Industrial Revolution occurred when steam-powered engines became powerful enough to drive factory equipment, propel ships, and pull trains. Engineers and inventors used steam power to automate factories and initiate the low-cost mass production of consumer goods. That process only accelerated when, in the late nineteenth century, the so-called Second Industrial Revolution saw electricity harnessed to drive factories and provide lighting.

Mass sales, however, are not easy. They require large distribution networks, massive advertising budgets, and, perhaps most important, cheap ways of shipping products from factories to consumers. Thus, it was essential that transportation was also vastly improved during the First and Second Industrial Revolutions.

The new technology is called additive manufacturing and it creates objects using computer-controlled devices known as 3-D printers. The 3-D (three-dimensional) printers contain a fine powder of metal or plastic particles that sit in a bin. A laser moves rapidly over the powder, the heat of its beam fusing small clumps of the powder together. Guided by a computerized blueprint, the rapidly moving laser can fuse together a single layer of a complicated object in just a few seconds.

The bin is then lowered a bit, another layer of powder is placed on top, and the laser again begins to shoot, this time fusing together both the previous layer as well as the current layer. Doing this over and over, one layer atop another, results in a solid object whose shape is limited only by the complexity of the blueprint. Any of the powder that is not struck by the laser and incorporated into the object is simply recycled for later use.

Because 3-D printers are inexpensive, they could potentially be located anywhere. Thus, there is no need to worry about transportation costs since objects could be manufactured by consumers in their own homes or in local workshops located only a short drive away. And because the powders are cheap and the machines only require a modest amount of electricity, anything that could be made using a 3-D printer would be inexpensive even if you were only making a single unit.

So far, only relatively simple objects can be made with 3-D printers. But some engineers see a day in the not-so-distant future when it may be possible to create even complicated devices like an iPhone using additive manufacturing. If so, people will simply download inexpensive blueprints, make a few changes to customize the product, and then print what they want.

Create your own individualized response to this prompt. In addition, you might consider these questions.

What are your instinctive first reflections on this piece?

What principles relating to production costs that you have learned in this module help to shed light on cost management at the factory floor level?

How does the differentiation of Marginal Cost versus Total Cost allow you to objectively analyze the benefits versus the hype of industrial mass production?

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