Reshaping Reality,
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The Shape of Printing to Come

Supply chains keep breaking. 3D printing will fix it.

How many parts does it take to build a car? 2,000 is a good guess, if you’re counting big pieces like the engine or transmission. But you can break it down even more. The engine has almost 200 different parts. The transmission is closer to 800. Getting down to the individual nuts and bolts, you end up with a list of almost 30,000 different pieces. With long supply chains, that’s 30,000 things that can go wrong.
 
In advanced manufacturing, if even a single part is missing, entire production lines shut down. Nothing ships, demand builds and prices climb. And when your supplier is 12,000 km away, replacement parts can take weeks or months to arrive. That’s assuming, of course, that they aren’t having supply chain problems of their own.
 
“COVID exposed how fragile supply chains had become,” says Mitch Debora, co-founder and CEO of Mosaic, a 3D printer manufacturer. “Parts were arriving late, or not at all. Shelves were empty and businesses had no idea how to adjust.”
 
Part of the problem stems from how difficult it is to retool a production line. From a time and cost perspective, it’s only worthwhile if you’ll be making and selling as much of the product as possible. Even then, there’s a lot of lead time before you’ll have anything in your hands. Especially in uncertain situations, the risk is high.
 
To give manufacturers more flexibility, Mosaic is bringing 3D printing to the factory floor on an industrial scale. Their Array system links multiple printers together to fully automate production. Now, a new production run can start in a matter of days or hours, rather than weeks or months. The moment a part is printed, the supply chain gap can be considered closed.
 
“It’s on-demand, localized manufacturing,” explains Mitch. “Businesses can print the parts they need right away, instead of having to shut down.”
 
Before they launched the Array, Mosaic worked with NGen to make sure it was meeting manufacturers’ needs. NGen got them in touch with interested businesses who tested early prototypes. With regular feedback from real-world conditions, Mosaic was able to adjust and iterate faster and get to market sooner.
 
“The partnerships we made through NGen helped us keep a lens on what matters to the actual users,” Mitch says. “That’s not just cost and reliability, it’s user-friendliness, too. The easier it is to use our systems, the more our customers’ uptime and throughput improves. That’s really our promise.”
 
Mosaic’s printers are a far cry from the 3D printers most people are familiar with. Early 3D printers broke frequently and took an expert to operate. Automation was non-existent. Creating anything more than a single part wasn’t reasonable. To solve supply chain issues, Mosaic aimed for much higher volume.
 
To work at the scale and speed the industry needs to operate without interruption, they engineered the Array to integrate easily into systems like project management and inventory software. Everything is designed to be simple and user friendly so that a single operator can run the equivalent of 250 individual 3D printers with minimal training. In total, throughput increases by as much as 10x; cost per part drops by as much as 95%.
 
“Where we really make a difference is in batches of 250,000 or less,” Mitch says. “Keeping those out of risky supply chains makes everything much more reasonable and manageable. Coordinating storage and delivery gets simpler. And if some delivery does come in late, it’s easy to print exactly the amount you need while you wait for the parts to arrive.”

It’s also making a difference in healthcare, especially in remote communities. Newfoundland-based PolyUnity is using Mosaic’s systems to let hospitals and clinics print high-quality and specialty parts on-demand, rather than relying on extended and expensive supply chains. Their cloud-based system acts as a virtual warehouse, where healthcare providers can print from a huge selection of templates. If they can’t find what they need, 3D printing experts will work with them to design, test and finalize a new template. The physical products become as accessible and transferable as digital goods.