Manufacturing Options: 3D printing provides a wide variety of manufactured products, including customizable products and even an individual’s personal designs.
Rapid Prototyping: Products can more quickly go from just a design to an actual prototype.
Manufacturing Speed: Just like the previous advantage, the manufacturing speed for a large number of final products is equally fast.
Reduced Costs: Even though the initial setup costs are higher, 3D printing has become cheaper than cheap labor in third world countries. Additionally, the costs of 3D printing are still decreasing, with the potential of 3D printers in homes in the near future. Furthermore, the costs of customized products are the same for mass production products.
Warehousing: With traditional manufacturing technologies, it is much faster and cheaper to manufacture additional products that you probably know that you will eventually need. However with 3D printing, only products that are sold need to be manufactured, thus warehousing of excess inventory is significantly less needed.
More Jobs: More engineers are needed to design and build 3D printers, and more technicians are needed to maintain, use, and fix 3D printers too. Additionally, with the lower cost of manufacturing, more designers and artists would be able deliver their products to the market. Even more domestic jobs for shipping these products should be created too.
Medical: One of the innovative products that 3D printing may provide is the manufacturing of customizable human body parts or organs. While these usages are still experimental, the potential advantages are huge. Imagine doctors quickly building and replacing critical organs, such as the heart, lungs, or liver that will have almost no chance of donor rejection, since the organs will be built using the patients’ unique characters and DNA.
ADVANTAGES for 3-D printing
