Additive manufacturing, as a process, has been around for several decades now. Although it still has a lot of promise, it seems that it never lived up to the expectations experts, business owners and leader had for this process. The main reason for this stagnancy is long times in certain phases of the process. This bottleneck is especially visible during postprocessing. Recent survey found that 3 out of 4 business leaders think that existing technology cannot overcome the issue and may cause them to miss the production targets.
Key Takeaways:
- Creating lighter, stronger equipment parts via additive manufacturing, otherwise known as 3-D, has yet to gain widespread traction in the production sphere.
- 2015 was an especially low point when it came to enthusiasm for 3-D. Some industry mavens predicted a gap of a decade at least for the process to gain Plateau of Productivity status.
- The vaunted Plateau of Productivity was and is a benchmark. It marks a point at which a process has gained widespread acceptance and starts to mature.
“The trough is littered with no-way-in-hell-is-this-going-to-work ideas, such as one day droves of consumers will buy 3D printers for home use.”
