To anyone who hasn’t seen it demonstrated, 3-D printing sounds
futuristic—like the meals that materialized in the Jetsons’ oven at the touch
of a keypad. But the technology is quite straightforward: It is a small evolutionary
step from spraying toner on paper to putting down layers of something more
substantial (such as plastic resin) until the layers add up to an object. And
yet, by enabling a machine to produce objects of any shape, on the spot and as
needed, 3-D printing really is ushering in a new era.
As applications of the technology expand and prices drop, the
first big implication is that more goods will be manufactured at or close to
their point of purchase or consumption. This might even mean household-level
production of some things. (You’ll pay for raw materials and the IP—the
software files for any designs you can’t find free on the web.) Short of that,
many goods that have relied on the scale efficiencies of large, centralized
plants will be produced locally. Even if the per-unit production cost is
higher, it will be more than offset by the elimination of shipping and of
buffer inventories. Whereas cars today are made by just a few hundred factories
around the world, they might one day be made in every metropolitan area. Parts
could be made at dealerships and repair shops, and assembly plants could
eliminate the need for supply chain management by making components as needed.
Another implication is that goods will be infinitely more
customized, because altering them won’t require retooling, only tweaking the
instructions in the software. Creativity in meeting individuals’ needs will
come to the fore, just as quality control did in the age of rolling out
sameness.
These first-order implications will cause businesses all along
the supply, manufacturing, and retailing chains to rethink their strategies and
operations. And a second-order implication will have even greater impact. As
3-D printing takes hold, the factors that have made China the workshop of the world
will lose much of their force.
China won’t be a loser in the new era, but it will have to give
up on being the world’s manufacturing powerhouse.
China has grabbed outsourced-manufacturing contracts from every
mature economy by pushing the mass-manufacturing model to its limit. It not
only aggregates enough demand to create unprecedented efficiencies of scale but
also minimizes a key cost: labor. Chinese government interventions have been
pro-producer at every turn, favoring the growth of the country’s manufacturers
over the purchasing power and living standards of its consumers.
Under a model of widely distributed, highly flexible,
small-scale manufacturing, these daunting advantages become liabilities. No
workforce can be paid little enough to make up for the cost of shipping across
oceans. And few managers raised in a pro-producer climate have the consumer
instincts to compete on customization.
It seems that the United States and other Western countries,
almost in spite of themselves, will pull off the old judo technique of
exploiting a competitor’s lack of balance and making its own massive weight
instrumental in its fall.
China won’t be a loser in the new era; like every nation, it
will have a domestic market to serve on a local basis, and its domestic market
is huge. And not all products lend themselves to 3-D printing. But China will
have to give up on being the mass-manufacturing powerhouse of the world. The
strategy that has given it such political heft won’t serve it in the future.
The great transfer of wealth and jobs to the East over the past
two decades may have seemed a decisive tipping point. But this new technology
will change again how the world leans.
https://hbr.org/2013/03/3-d-printing-will-change-the-world
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