In today’s current manufacturing landscape, the prototyping process is excruciatingly slow. The road to a final product is littered with decisions and alterations that can have serious and expensive consequences. Many lament that the current process of making a part remains unpredictable and unreliable.
At the same time, an entire generation of product designers have emerged in today’s modern maker culture: constantly tweaking and refining in search of a better product. However, there is an increased manufacturing risk because parts seldom complete the journey through chains of marketplaces, service bureaus, and machine shops in-spec and on-time. Noting the industry-wide shift towards innovation and trade, a 2012 McKinsey Global Institute report, calls for manufacturers to increase flexibility and improve customer service in order to stay competitive. “Demand is fragmenting as customers ask for greater variation and more types of after-sales service,” the report says. “Manufacturers and policy makers need new approaches and capabilities.”
Smart manufacturing company Plethora grew out of a fundamental challenge: conventional manufacturing is dominated by lack of transparency, high minimum quotas, and frequent delays. But with a more automated process, custom parts can be made quickly and consistently up to spec.
Plethora is the factory with the modern manufacturing economy in mind, seeking to make manufacturing seamless, instant, and transparent. Through modern processes and software, Plethora is innovating upon traditional manufacturing processes to produce high-quality machined parts with quick turnaround times. With their software, Plethora delivers instant pricing and manufacturability feedback for engineers designing their parts. Their web-platform allows users to upload their designs and have them manufactured in Plethora’s factory. Plethora supports custom milling and tuning in over 20 materials, from polymer to metal.
From prototype to part in three days
Designers begin manufacturing their parts by uploading a computer automated design file. Users have the option of working in their preferred CAD program through the Plethora add-in or through their direct upload. Plethora then provides the designs with instant manufacturability feedback, quotes and delivery times. The software gives on-demand insight into tooling limitations, design improvements, and cost saving. “For busy engineers, our add-in means they don’t need to worry about sourcing parts or the back-and-forth with a manufacturer. Now, they can spend more time engineering,” said Plethora CEO Nick Pinkston.
Traditionally, the manufacturing process can be opaque and involve many contacts and procedures. Their innovation is integrating design feedback, comprehensive order status reports, and a full customer service infrastructure into a seamless interface. By enabling a manufacturing feedback system during critical moments in the design stage, Plethora’s software guarantees smart manufacturing where a blueprint turns into a part that can ship in as soon as three days.
Plethora’s adaptations are uniquely influenced by the maker’s mindset. The company calls their formula: CNC + DFM. Computer numerical control (CNC) has already revolutionized modern product design, reducing the barriers to slow and expensive manufacturing streams. DFM, or Design For Manufacturing, actively considers the product’s future manufacturing process during the design phase.
A factory for the modern manufacturing economy
Design iteration is almost always limited by the length of the typical prototyping loop. Plethora can produce a part in as few as three days. Just as Amazon gave mom-and-pop shops access to a global market, Plethora aims to give anyone from dorm room makers to multinational companies access to seamless, instant, and precise manufacturing. By automating key steps of conventional manufacturing, Plethora brings the factory floor to the designer and democratizes the industry as a whole. Thus, innovators are able to iterate much faster at lower costs. “Plethora’s take on the future of manufacturing, and hardware development in general, is that it will look a lot more like software development. It’s all about iteration,” Pinkston says. “This lets hardware teams experiment and be a lot more agile than they are now, and it lets smaller teams get the leverage they need from their tools to compete with bigger companies.”
CNC + DFM may be an innovative approach to global supply chain management, but to Pinkston, it’s the natural progression and essential next step. It is simply about applying a maker’s mindset to today’s brave new world of manufacturing: how can companies do this quickly, efficiently, and transparently?
Steeped in maker culture, Plethora seeks to reinvent hardware. Despite historically high barriers to manufacturing, an entire generation of makers has built their identity upon constantly tweaking, testing, refining, and striving for better design and functionality.
At the end of the day, the maker community is being empowered more than ever to iterate faster, proof that the hardware revolution is upon us. By bringing Silicon Valley technology and the maker-mindset to conventional manufacturing— Plethora is pioneering a future for manufacturing.