On a recent press trip to HP’s new Vancouver, WA facility, I found myself thinking of a meme I’ve come across occasionally featuring a bell curve. On the left is the foolish or “low IQ” person espousing some naïve belief that turns out to be shared by the wise “high IQ” person on the right. In the middle, above the peak, is the so-called “midwit” person of average intelligence and majority opinion, the one who (wrongly) disagrees with both the fool and the sage.
It struck me that HP’s move into additive manufacturing (AM) a little more than a decade ago fits surprisingly well into this format. A naïve observer might have thought that it makes sense for HP to get into 3D printing because the company was already well-established in 2D printing. Meanwhile, someone more familiar with mainstream desktop 3D printing at the time might have scoffed at the idea that there’s any substantive connection between 2D and 3D printing. The wise engineer, however, would recognize that HP’s expertise in printhead technology makes it well-positioned to enter into the AM market with Multi Jet Fusion (MJF), vindicating the naïve belief.
This little exercise might help frame HP’s entry into 3D printing, but a lot has happened since then and it’s easy to forget just how much has changed in the AM industry in the intervening years. To get a better sense of HP’s additive journey, where the company stands today, and what our expectations for the future should be, I sat down with senior vice president and general manager for HP Additive Manufacturing Solutions, Alex Moñino.
The road to MJF at HP
engineering.com: Can you share a bit of your professional background and how you got to where you are today?
Alex Moñino: Absolutely. I’m an engineer by training, and I started at HP 29 years ago as a student and basically built my career here. I spent a few years in the US in printing and services and then, about 15 years ago, we saw an opportunity in 3D printing.
It was in the large-format division, where one of our market segments was mechanical engineers. They used to print the plans of what they were designing from different views—front, back, lateral—but then we realized that, with 3D software, they didn’t need to print those plans anymore because they could visualize everything on a screen. Eventually, those engineers did start printing again, but now they were 3D printing their prototypes, so we started investigating whether we could get that market back.
We did an OEM arrangement with Stratasys at the time, just to check if our go-to-market could sell it, and then we decided to invest in MJF technology. In 2013, the business plan I drove was approved by the company, so I’m one of the founders along with Ramon Pastor, who drove more of the technology side.
When you were drafting that business plan, did you think it would be a hard sell?
At the time, no, it was not a very hard sell. The industry had a lot of hype and I think everybody saw the opportunity, though it probably seemed bigger and faster than what it ended up being. Having said that, we’ve built a fantastic business inside HP with a lot of growth momentum right now and a lot of potential.
Obviously, you’re still connected to HP and benefiting from the larger organization’s advances in print technology, but are you otherwise operating independently?
Pretty much. It’s like I’m the CEO of this division and my shareholder is HP. We have our own sales force, our own marketing, but we can also leverage the procurement and manufacturing of the broader HP organization, and that gives us a lot of benefits in procuring materials, dealing with suppliers, et cetera. It’s like the best of both worlds, because we still have leverage while operating independently.
From prototyping to production
We’ve heard a lot about production applications today, which makes sense because that’s where this industry is heading, but I’ve been wondering lately whether we’ve gone as far as we can go with prototyping. Do you think there are still gains to be had or advances to be made there?
I think there’s still a long way to go. If you look at the younger engineers, it’s almost like AI. I have an AI coach on my team who’s a 22-year-old student, and if I look at how my daughters are using AI, it’s very different from me. So, I think as younger generations come in, there’s still a lot of growth to be had in prototyping. Having said that, there are lots of technologies right now that provide “good enough” prototyping for non-functional parts, like some of the cheaper FDM machines out there. But I think that’s good because it will help the overall industry through ideation. What’s going to make this industry really scale, though, is production applications.
On that point, when I think about AM for production, I distinguish between end-use parts and tooling or manufacturing support. Which of those segments is bigger for you right now, and where do you see the biggest opportunity?
Tooling is a big segment right now: jigs, fixtures, et cetera, but I would say the biggest growth potential is in final part production. Tooling is a big part of our business because it was the first point of adoption, and obviously it’s still growing, but it’s not the fastest-growing. The fastest growth we see is in final part production in orthotics and prosthetics, drones, robotics, humanoids, even automotive.
So, looking ahead, in five or ten years you’d expect the majority of your revenue to be coming from end-use rather than tooling?
Yes.
I came across a quote from someone in the AM industry recently: “If you can make a part any other way, you probably should.” What are your thoughts on that?
It’s a partial view of a very long process where, if you want to see the value of additive in production, you need to look at the whole end-to-end chain. If you’re looking at just one part, you’re looking at the MOQ, the cost, the lead time. If you’re the purchasing manager looking for a price target, that quote is probably valid.
From my perspective, that’s a very narrow view. From a broader view, you need to think about the entire design process: How often do changes occur? What’s the risk of a single-source supply? Do you need real-time delivery or do you just want to order your MOQ of 100,000 units? Are you actually going to sell 100,000 units or just 10,000 with potential changes along the way?
It’s a very narrow view of the world and it doesn’t capture the benefits that a flexible technology like 3D printing in manufacturing can bring to your overall end-to-end product lifecycle.
So what’s the magic number for 3D printing? Where is the threshold in production volume where it makes more sense to use injection molding or another conventional process? Obviously, that’s going to depend on whom you ask, but what I’m really interested in is how much that number is moving.
It’s moved a lot. Think of a roughly exponential curve with cost on one axis and volume on the other: if you can cut your cost in half, you can increase your viable production volume tenfold. That’s been our standing declaration: we aim to reduce the total cost of ownership by half every two to three years, and we’ve been meeting that goal.
Of course, it’s very part-dependent, and on top of the pure cost calculation, you have to factor in design flexibility—if you go from version A to version B in injection molding, you essentially have to start over, whereas 3D printing stays flexible throughout your iteration cycles.
Is this an ongoing goal? Are you aiming to continue bringing TCO down indefinitely?
That’s our declaration. We might meet it or not, but we’ve been meeting it for the last two or three years and it’s one of our objectives every year to continue driving TCO down because we believe that’s going to be a catalyst for industry growth.
Standardization and quality in AM
I want to ask about standardization around materials and processes. That still seems to be a bit of a stumbling block for the AM industry, so I’m curious how you see standardization fitting into the bigger picture.
I think it will come as the industry matures and scales. Standardization exists because things have been done a certain way for decades; I’m not saying it’s going to take decades, but it takes time for new use cases to become established. There are also forcing functions, like COVID-19, where we were standardizing things in days instead of months because there was an urgent need and the regulatory bodies were very flexible.
I think 3D printing is still a very fragmented industry for several reasons. One is the extremely broad set of applications, each requiring different materials and processes. That’s why we introduced a filament product, because our MJF cannot process high-temperature materials. It’s why the industry has such a myriad set of technologies, and I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon.
It’s going to take time, and I think it’s driven by the customer. In our business, we typically go hand-in-hand with our customers to standardization and certification. They’re the ones that bring us there.
What about quality and reliability? That’s another common concern about AM, and it seems like it’s been a high priority for you for some time now. Is that a fair characterization?
Absolutely, and in two senses. The obvious one is the quality of our products. One of the best and worst things about being part of HP is that we have very high quality standards. That’s good for our customers, but it comes at a cost and takes time. The less obvious angle is the quality of the manufacturing process, where you’re talking about OEE, Cpk, tolerance distributions, and so on. This is top-of-mind for us, and it’s also a requirement in many production environments.
If you look at ADDMAN, which has 35 printers in San Diego, they need to make sure that there is printer-to-printer consistency. There are also times when they might be at capacity and so subcontracting jobs to other people, but they need to make sure that the quality of their parts is consistent. For us, that’s ensured through process development, using AI to recalibrate or compensate for where and when someone is printing to ensure consistent output within tolerance.
So it’s definitely top-of-mind for us, and it’s a requirement in many production scenarios, such as the automotive industry, where the quality standards are very high.
Education and competition in 3D printing
It seems like ease of use was a priority with the MJF 1200. Do you get the sense that education is still a big barrier to AM adoption? Is there a lot of work still to be done to educate engineers and bring them up to speed on MJF technology, or would you say it’s well enough known at this point that that’s no longer the case?
I think MJF is well known as a technology but there’s still a lot of room to grow. Designers could be more aware of what it can do, and that’s why we launched the hashtag MadeWithHPMJF. There’s also education on the machines themselves. In an industrial environment, you have a professional operator whose full-time job is to run the printer. With the 1200, we’re targeting design environments and design engineers who need access to the technology without a dedicated operator.
I always tell my team, “If you’re selling tickets at a metro station with a vending machine, you need to think about the millions of people who are going to use that machine for the first time.” That’s what we had in mind when we designed the MJF 1200.
You’re giving me flashbacks to the first time I tried to use the Metro in Paris.
Yeah, they didn’t do a great design job there.
Last question: Are you more worried about competition from China or from the West?
Whenever somebody asks me about who my biggest competitor is, it’s the inertia of designers. I’ll give you an example. We have a tractor manufacturer as a customer—not John Deere but a company that competes with them. In the cabin for one of their models, there are more than a hundred 3D printed parts: joysticks, pedals, levers, and so on. In the cabin for another model, there are three. So I asked them why they’re taking advantage of 3D printing in one model and not another, and they basically said that it’s because the models are managed by two different sets of engineers. There’s no other reason, just the conservatism or lack of awareness in one of those groups. So, I consider inertia my biggest competitor.
Now, to your question: I think it’s China because of the inroads those companies have been making. Not long ago, they didn’t have the quality you need in a production environment. We’ve had cases where customers went with Chinese companies first for the sake of cost, and then had to walk back some big installs because they weren’t delivering the production outcomes they were expecting. But the innovation and the speed that’s coming from these Chinese companies is mind blowing. I’ve been there twice already this year and the ecosystem is very impressive. But competition is healthy, right? It keeps you moving and thinking.
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