Innovate to Survive. Innovate to Thrive

You’ve heard it before: the advice to innovate to thrive. And in a challenging economy, you may need to innovate just to survive.

Nothing gives me a sense of pride more than to hear of a company innovating and thriving with the aid of Stratasys FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) Technology.

An article in the Green Bay Press Gazette profiles Wisconsin Plastics Inc. as a company thriving in a tough economy with some help from FDM. The article refers to the manufacturer’s FDM machine as “the jewel” of its design and manufacturing efforts.

FDM helps Wisconsin Plastics:

· Add value by supplying prototypes to injection molding customers prior to production

· Produce parts, components and fixtures that can’t be made with traditional manufacturing methods

· Manufacture products with moving and meshing parts that require no assembly

· Reduce pre-production tooling costs by up to $20,000 per mold by perfecting the design before investing in tooling

· Reduce lead time for tooling

· Perform direct digital manufacturing (which eliminates machining and tooling altogether)

Our customers have been using FDM to perform direct digital manufacturing for more than a decade now, but much of that time it was a well-kept secret. With average cost reductions of 50 percent and average lead time reductions near 70 percent, the results are too impressive to remain a secret.

The cat is out of the bag now and the pace of adoption is quickening.