Push Button Manufacturing: The Future of Making Things
- The nature of work is changing
- How can we remove the constraints on design that traditional manufacturing processes impose?
- What are the major catalysts for disruption that we are seeing?
- There is a convergence of new technologies in manufacturing and our goal is to make these available to everyone
- Our prediction: “As designed” will become “as built” with the push of a button
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At the 2018 edition of the North American Manufacturing Excellence Summit, Greg Fallon, Autodesk’s VP of Generative Design and Manufacturing Products, gave a breakfast briefing on Push Button Manufacturing. Afterwards he sat down for a follow up interview on this important new trend.
The full transcript of the interview is below, or you can download a PDF version.
You gave a talk today, a breakfast briefing. What was the subject of your presentation?
The briefing this morning was about our vision for Push Button Manufacturing.
Push Button Manufacturing is a simplified version of where we see manufacturing going in the future. The simplified analogy that we use —and I don’t mean this to be insulting to manufacturers because it is very simplified— but if you think back to the early days of desktop printing in the 80s and 90s the idea is that you would design a document, you would essentially write a document that you would see on your screen, and then you would go to print it and what came out on the printer was often not what you had in mind.
In a way that’s a nice metaphor or analogy for manufacturing, because it’s very hard to make what you’re manufacturing look like the design intent, and that’s the problem that we’re trying to solve.
It’s how do you automate different steps in the process so that what comes out of the manufacturing line matches what the design looks like without a lot of work going on in between.
In the past five years or so, Additive Manufacturing has grown into its own and matured. It is now being used in real world applications. How does that fit into the larger topic of Push Button Manufacturing?
It’s perfect because Additive Manufacturing gives the end user a lot of flexibility. You can customize every design and you can go from design to print much faster than traditional methods, like machining where you have to do very complex tool pathing and understanding the tools you’re working on and the tools you’re working with.
Whereas, Additive Manufacturing gives you a ton of flexibility. You can print a shoe one minute and an engine block later that day with a lot of changes.
There’s also tremendous change in the types of designs that you can print versus designs that you can say machine or cast. Printing gives you access to geometric complexity that was not available before.
An example I like to talk about is the redesign of an F1 cylinder head that we worked on with another company. To think about how Additive Manufacturing would change that cylinder head, we came up with a bunch of different design changes and manufacturing changes.
Traditionally the cylinder heads are cast and machined, so changing that to Additive Manufacturing changes that particular paradigm. Once you’re 3D printing a type of cylinder head, you don’t have to worry about all the excess material that exists in the original cylinder head, so you can use things like lattices to reduce the volume of the cylinder head.
You have a lot less excess or unused material. The whole concept of waste is very different with 3D printing. The amount of waste material might be 5% of what you would have with another method.
Once you start to do things like latticing the design, you get things like weight reduction inherently in the design. In this case, this is important to a racecar.
In addition to that, you get things like enhanced heat transfer. Because you’re using these lattices, the amount of surface area on the engine available to cool it goes up by many orders of magnitude and that allows you to get more heat out of the engine, which allows you to operate at higher temperatures and pressures, which improves the performance of the engine overall.
So, there’s this avalanche of benefits that comes out from simply changing the means of production.
Michael Schroeder
Alistair Hirst has been Senior Vice President, Global Supply Chain, Kellogg Company, since 2012. He is also a member of the company’s Global Leadership Team. Mr. Hirst joined Kellogg Company in 1984 as a Food Technologist at the Springs, South Africa plant. While at the facility, he was promoted to Quality Assurance Manager and Production Manager. In 1993, he accepted an assignment at the company’s Botany, Australia plant as Production Manager. In 1994, he returned to South Africa when he was promoted to Plant Manager, and in 1997, he was named Director, Supply Chain at the facility. Mr. Hirst relocated to the Manchester, England facility in 2001 when promoted to Director, Procurement, and in 2004, he was named European Logistics Director. In January 2005, he relocated to the U.S. when promoted to Vice President, Global Procurement. Mr. Hirst was promoted to Senior Vice President, Snacks Supply Chain in January 2008 and to Senior Vice President, North America Supply Chain in October 2011.
Ebly Sanchez has worked in the Volvo Group since 2008 both in Sweden and in USA mainly in the area of Continuous Improvement. Before 2008, he worked for the Ford Motor Company for almost 20 years in several areas of manufacturing including quality, production, manufacturing engineering, new product launches and general operation management in USA and South America, particularly Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela. Currently, Ebly has overall responsibility for Continuous Improvement in Region Americas including strategy, deployment, and coaching for the whole organization including Manufacturing, Sales/Marketing, Purchasing, Product Development and the support organizations such as HR, Group IT, logistics, customer service, business control and financial services.
As part of the Senior Management team, Susan is responsible for leadership in all areas of Quality Systems, Color and Product Standards, Customer Satisfaction, and Supplier Quality Management. Her team is focused on developing processes and standard practices to assure quality across the supply chain, from supplier materials, through Product Development, on to Manufacturing and Distribution, and finally at the customer level. Susan’s additional area of focus is leading the Continuous Improvement effort. This team, working with the entire Operations organization, implements standards of excellence to improve efficiency and effectiveness measured using metrics. Susan came to Benjamin Moore in 2013 after a long career as Director of Quality Systems at Colgate-Palmolive. During her tenure at Colgate, Susan developed and implemented the company’s first Good Manufacturing Practices initiative and subsequent audit program of more than 60 sites around the world. 
Jorge joined GE in 2001 and is a graduate of the Operations Management Leadership program. He has amassed broad experience across Aviation including Engine Assembly, Overhaul, Systems and Component Manufacturing. Roles ranged from front line leader, black belt and operational leader to plant leader at three different supply chain sites. This positioned him well to lead the strategic initiatives including ‘Brilliant Factory’ for GE Aviation Supply Chain. In addition, he has a demonstrated track record of delivering results in uncertain times and growing and developing strong diverse teams. Jorge has a bachelor’s degree in Manufacturing Engineering from Boston University. Outside of GE, he enjoys spending time with his wife Caroline and two young daughters Gabriella and Sophia. He is an avid runner and enjoys training for marathons.
Eric R. Branyan oversees the complex international network of suppliers that provide critical hardware for the F-35 program. He was most recently Vice President, F-35 Aircraft Production Business Unit, responsible for global F-35 production and for the full life cycle of production aircraft from proposal of long lead components through delivery to operational bases. Key elements supporting F-35 production include: program operations, supply chain, affordability, tooling, and quality. Mr. Branyan has also held the position of Vice President & Deputy General Manager responsible for the overall execution of the F-35 development across tri-company team and suppliers, and F-35 Air System Development. His responsibilities also included leadership of 1,900 technical professionals across Air System Integration, Air Vehicle Development and Mission Systems.
Jay Ford is the Director of Membership for UI LABS, a Chicago based innovation accelerator that brings Universities, Industry, and Government together to deliver solutions to tomorrow’s challenges. Jay is charged with recruiting the best and brightest Industrial leaders to join UI LABS Digital Manufacturing Design and Innovation Institute. DMDII brings together technical experts, entrepreneurs, executives, investors, and leaders in government to reimagine the challenges they face and to guide them toward solutions that will drive innovation in their industries. Before devoting his work fulltime to UI LABS, Jay served in senior leadership roles with software and hardware startups in Silicon Valley and Chicago. In addition to his day job at UI LABS, Jay leads the UI LABS running club – better known as the Goose Island Rat Dodgers, he maintains and races a vintage Miata, and care takes of a flock of nineteen chickens and two ducks. 
Paul Boris joined GE in 2014 as CIO of Advanced Manufacturing, driving IT’s brilliant factory strategy by using big data, software, sensors, controllers and robotics to increase productivity and deliver asset and operations optimization. In early 2016, with the creation of the GE Digital business, Paul stepped into a new role as Head of Manufacturing Industries for GE Digital. Paul’s focus in this role is to define and enable GE’s commercial strategy for Brilliant Manufacturing by working with companies to accelerate their own digital transformation.
Phil McIntyre has been with Milliken over 29 years in leadership roles encompassing both the business and manufacturing arenas. He successfully led several business units within Milliken & Company to profitable growth and financial sustainability, as well as the Performance Products Division Milliken Performance System implementation. Phil was Director of Cost Improvement, and he also spent time as the Pursuit of Excellence Director responsible for integrating customer needs with manufacturing and business capability. Early in his career, Phil worked in several different manufacturing locations for Milliken & Company across the southeast. He credits this early diversity in job responsibility and scope as the beginning of his in-depth knowledge of continuous improvement, his appreciation for sustainable, empowered safety processes and systems, and the criticality of establishing the right financial metrics to drive the right behavior.
