Additive Manufacturing for Business

(upbeat music) - Hi there and welcome to 3D Opportunity, the course on additive manufacturing for business leaders. My name is Mark Cotteleer and I'm a Research Director at Deloitte. You know over the past several years it's been hard to ignore all the hype surrounding the topic of additive manufacturing, more commonly known as 3D printing.

It seems like hardly a day goes by without some newspaper article or news story hyping the next great advancement in this technology and we think that's important because this is a key technology for the future. We see additive manufacturing as indeed having a strong impact on the addition of business value for manufacturers over the next decade. But it also leaves manufacturers in a difficult position. It's hard to figure out how to translate the concepts of additive manufacturing from a newspaper article to the actual idea of producing a part that matters in the real world.

The aim of this course is to address that challenge. Our goal here is to provide you with the foundational understanding of how additive manufacturing applies within your business. We want to equip you to have a discussion with your boss or your colleagues, your customers or your suppliers in order to help them understand what the path forward with this technology actually is. In order to accomplish that goal, we've designed a fairly straightforward course. We'll begin by setting a context for you. We'll define additive manufacturing and help you understand why we think it's important to use that term instead of the more commonly used term 3D printing.

We'll also explore the makeup of the industry and provide you with a little bit of history from where we came from. This technology is after all over 30 years old. We'll then move on to address two key questions. Number one, what is additive manufacturing? In order to do that we'll explore seven fundamental processes with examples of technologies through which we can explore applications, advantages, and disadvantages of each of those processes. The next big question is how does additive manufacturing apply to my business.

In order to explore that question we'll present you with a framework that explores the underlying economics that impact both products and supply chains and also explores how those two things come together to inspire new business models. We'll also examine how we can apply the framework to specific industries that have already made strong use of additive manufacturing technologies. We'll conclude by examining some of the issues that impact additive manufacturing technologies into the future. Now throughout this course we'll offer you the opportunity to interact both with us and with your fellow classmates.

We'll offer you quizzes and assessments and assignments that can deepen your knowledge of how additive manufacturing applies in general as well as to your business. We're excited to have you here and we're looking forward to getting started.