Five Minutes With… Robert Bodor, VP/GM, Proto Labs

I'm doing very well, Rich, how are you?

Sure, I'd be happy to do that. First though, just as a bit of context, Proto Labs certainly does a lot of prototyping, but we're also an on-demand manufacturer for low-volume production. So we play in spaces beyond just prototyping, which is one of the ways that we differ from desktop 3D printers.

Sure. Well, it's a little bit difficult to define strictly speaking because for every industry that cutoff is different. But we do anywhere from quantity one to quantity, let's say into the hundreds of thousands for customers as they need it. And we do so on demand, so we don't require minimum order quantities. They can come to us at any time and order any quantity, a few hundred, thousands, 10,000, and we'll respond to them and get them parts within usually a few days. So within the context of prototyping, we're the world's fastest manufacturer of parts across nine different manufacturing technologies, including molding, machining, and 3D printing. Within the context of 3D printing, we do commercial and industrial 3D printing in three different technologies: stereolithography and selective laser sintering, both plastic technologies that make parts in various plastic materials, and we also do metal laser sintering that produces metal 3D printed parts. This differs from desktop printing in several ways. First of all, the machines we use are large format, commercial and industrial in application, which means we can make very small parts but also much larger parts than are generally possible on desktop machines. The technologies we offer tend not to be well suited for desktop, though there are some stereolithography-like machines available on the desktop. But for the most part, these require secondary operations and facilities and expertise to support that, for example to remove the supports or prepare the parts. The metal laser sintered parts, for example, have supports of that same metal, so if you make a steel or titanium part, you have supports that are also steel and titanium that you need to remove. You also need facilities for heat treating and so on. In selective laser sintering, that's a powder bed based process, you need facilities to manage that powder and remove it from the finished part and then recycle it. Even within stereolithography, there are facilities needed for finishing and cleaning the parts after they come out of the bath. So those are some of the ways we differ from desktop 3D printers. Many of our customers have desktop 3D printers, but they still use us since we can turn parts in as little as one day, if it's something they can't make on their desktop machine, or if the machine is fully utilized, or they don't want to deal with the hassle. Then they might use us in a way that complements what they can do in house.

For the kinds of parts we make in terms of molding, machining, and printing, in those kinds of technologies, I haven't run across such an application yet. For early concept models, sometimes it's helpful for designers to have a machine right there for them, but there's still overhead with maintenance and so on that they have to manage. So yeah, I haven't, we haven't run across that.

Sure. Well, as general manager, I need to be able to do numerous things and appreciate the needs of the business in many aspects beyond technology. However, our business is differentiated in large part by the level of automation we've introduced, both software and hardware, throughout the manufacturing processes and also tied to how we interface with customers. So I would say that an appreciation of that technology and how it impacts our business is key for me, probably for many of our employees across many roles. But I think it has helped me in terms of developing the strategy and managing our operations to have some of that background.