3D Manufacturing Sustainability from Supply Chain Disruption to Digital Transformation with Nicholas Smith

 

Now, more than ever, the world is moving at a breakneck pace. Companies and businesses need to be able to change with it if they want to stay relevant and still be a part of it in the future. But being able to remain relevant is only part of it. One also needs to be sustainable to cope with so many product and material shortages and increasing demand for eco-friendly products. Joining Tom Hazzard and Tracy Hazzard on the WTFFF?! Podcast Special Series today is Nicholas Smith, the Director of Operations for HP, Inc. Nicholas gives an eye-opening view of 3D manufacturing sustainability, supply chain management, digital production, and planning to create business sustainability. He also talks about HP’s initiative to innovate a better way to print, publish, and produce while lowering the environmental impact of printing.

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3D Manufacturing Sustainability from Supply Chain Disruption to Digital Transformation with Nicholas Smith

We’re going to talk about 3D manufacturing sustainability. On the one hand, we talk about sustainability as green. You think about the green aspect of things. It’s going green. Sustainability is the supply chain and your manufacturing process. There are lots of other things that complies that. There’s carbonization or decarbonization where we’re taking and making it more efficient to truck things or not truck things for a change or not cart across an ocean, any of those things that we can change in the process. We have been working in this a long time. This is not new to us. This is our entire career. There’s always been a little bit of sustainability edge. It’s always been hard because you’re balancing like, “Is it the right time? Is economics there or is it not quite yet?” I’m a fan of making baby steps. It doesn’t matter, as long as we’re making an improvement over the last time we made a part or we made a design. If we can make some sustainability improvement, then we’ve done something good for the world.

It’s not only that, but at times you have to deal with what the market is going to accept in a product. We’re going to know with our interview in this episode that there are some unique opportunities being presented in our world now that may help make some of these things even more acceptable sooner than we thought.

When we start to mix the variables so that all of a sudden, some things pop up given that we said these are non-negotiable in manufacturing when they can’t change the certain design, you say, “You can’t do engineering. You can’t change this.” All of a sudden, the environment or the economy negotiates with you, things open up and manufacturing is not usually open to that. I can tell you that they like to do the same thing every single time. That’s why Nicholas Smith, our guest, has an eye-opening view of 3D manufacturing and sustainability at that rate. He’s the Director of Operations for HP in the Graphics and 3D Printing Department. Although, he’s worked in multiple divisions over his time. He’s from the UK originally. He spent 30 years based in Singapore working with HP. He’s responsible for the manufacturing of HP’s portfolio 3D Multi Jet Fusion and the large-format printers. He’s had experience in automation and manufacturing scanners. He’s been around the company for a while and has a broader view of their supply chain, their process and their equipment and everything that they do. They make printers in China, Malaysia and Singapore, which is interesting. He’s going to talk about that.

I enjoyed getting to speak with him, and I think you will enjoy it too. On WTFFF?!, we never had anybody on as a guest with quite his perspective. It was eye-opening and refreshing. I hope you enjoy it too.

Nicholas Smith, thank you for joining us. It’s wonderful to talk across the ocean.

Thanks for having me on. I’m happy to be here.

Sustainability is one of my favorite subjects, whether I’m talking about sustainability of making a sustainable business model. I used to write blogs early on. I was an early blogger, writing columns on Easy Going Green. I was talking about sustainability in furniture industry and all kinds of things. I would write all these articles and no one read them but my dad. Now, it’s become common part of almost every business discussion. I’m glad it’s there, but it’s core to what you’re doing at HP.

It seems even more important now having this Coronavirus epidemic. The increased focus on doing things the right way, doing things in a way which is local as opposed to central and allowing manufacturing to take place near where it needs to be done. It has reached a new level of importance for many reasons.

Isn’t that becoming apparent to all of us around the world as there’s been a pause in a lot of manufacturing and travel? The atmosphere is benefiting tremendously. We saw it in China first, when they had COVID-19 impact and factory shut down.

It was such a long period from Chinese New Year all the way through. We saw some satellite images of what the Earth was looking like. There was such clearing over the oceans between California and Asia. That was amazing to see. We now realize, “We can do it. We can make an impact.”

That was a combination of supply shock, initially in China, then demand shock as it moved to the rest of the world. That has definitely shown us that we can do better. Hopefully, we can do better in better times as well. It’s definitely shown us a potential for the future.

It shows us the opportunity. That’s exactly what we were talking about. I love the idea of decentralization, but some things are challenging. We’ve heard about how many parts are in your HP printers. There’s some amount of complexity to things that do have to be more centralized, controlled and then distributed around the world. I know that you’re doing that in China, Malaysia and Singapore. You have a distribution, but are you starting to think maybe that could be different?

To be able to adopt 3D better and to get the benefits we want for #sustainability, we've got to bear in mind the economics of it as well. @hp @zbyhp Click To Tweet

Yes. I think COVID has maybe accelerated some of the discussions that people are having. The supply chain we have now is exactly what the economics of the current times demanded, which is producing things in an efficient way. You can buy a $5 t-shirt, but maybe we do need to change and we need to reshape what we’re doing. HP, along with many companies, is having a serious look at how we balance all the various competing factors. People are still going to want high quality products and at low costs. If you duplicate manufacturing in many different places, you lose economies of scale. I think 3D is going to have an increasing role and maybe allowing core vanilla products to be made in one location and then value-added at local locations.

I always like that idea. We call them hybrid. Our idea was that there was always this 3D print hybrid model going on where you had base products that 3D print products added onto or they were customized or personalized.

The reason HP is so enthusiastic about 3D is because this transformation from analog to digital is what we’ve seen in 2D printing for the last several years. An example of that, I don’t know if you have noticed but a couple of years ago, there was a ‘Share A Coke’ campaign by Coca-Cola. You would go into 7-11 and you’d find ‘Share A Coke with Tom,’ or, ‘Share A Coke with Tracy,’ on the Coke bottles. That is a campaign that went all around the world. Those labels, you didn’t notice, had been printed with two different technologies. The wraparound parts of the label, which are always standard because it tells you how much good is in a bottle of Coke, where it’s made, what the refund is in various states, that doesn’t change.

That was printed on analog, conventional, offset printing technology. The middle part of the label that faces the customer, which has the curvy line for Coke and has your name on was printed digitally at two separate locations. You can’t see the join and that’s because the quality of the 2D print was the same as the quality of the traditional print. The red Coke color was the same as the red Coke color printed by analog means. That’s what’s important to be able to allow this hybrid stuff. Quality is absolutely critical to being able to do this kind of thing.

Tracy has a particular experience in colors, materials and finishes. I know just from seeing that over her shoulder, if you will, that’s not an easy thing to coordinate, getting those colors to be the actual same. The seamlessness of the different kind of printing, that must’ve been quite a challenge.

It’s not as simple as those people think that you go, “Here’s my CMYK. Here’s my Pantone color,” then they work in two different types of medium.

Usually, for that kind of color and fidelity, you have to go away from process color which is the CMYK dots to a spot color. The spot colors we are able to get with our digital printing process are so accurate that I was told that the standard for Coke red is now the digital print standard, not the analog standard. Because it was so faithful and reproducible, we moved to that. That is a sign that things are transforming. It does take quite a while for digital to become as good as that.

I think Tiffany blue is on its way next. They’re going to be slow to adopt that because they’ve been hiding their formula from the colorists who’d been trying to match it perfectly. They’re going to be next though. Looking at 3D, that same model that you were talking about 2D, that’s an interesting concept because it does have to go through this hybrid stage before it can go into full production. As you say, there are parts and things that we can’t make in 3D today and materials we can’t use yet.

 

The gamut of materials has to get bigger because when you buy most products like a printer, they come with fairly specialist engineered resins to get particular properties to give you the accuracy that you need or the fire retardants or the strength that you need. 3D is more limited at the moment. We need to widen the gamut. We need to make the material properties better because depending on technology use, our 3D parts can be fairly brittle. They can be strong. It depends on exactly what technology you’re going after and what the resin is. You have to have the through-put to be faster and the machine up time to be higher. That’s how you start to take over traditional means of manufacturing and be able to do that tipping point longer and longer.

To be able to do that localized in other places when you have consistency from machine to machine and material to material.

That’s the exciting feature of 3D printing that I look forward to. I hope we see a lot of advancements here, still in our careers before we’re done doing this.

It will happen for sure because it has happened in 2D. I’m an operations guy. I’m not a futurist. I look backwards to see what has happened as the best predictor of what may happen in the 3D space.

That’s good because many in operations don’t want anything to change. It’s good that you’re forward-thinking.

The further away I can keep the R&D folks from my factory, the happier I am.

You’re talking to two R&D people here.

In manufacturing operations, we bring calm to the chaos, which is the creative process. That is a necessity because when it transforms into something people are going to want to buy from a brand they trust, it has to be every piece the same. It has to deliver what it says on the label and it must be every piece of the same. There are lots of creative people and hobbyists, which is fantastic, using their inexpensive 3D printers and using a fuse filament. To make that scale, people have to trust what they’re buying. Inevitably, it’s either a brand or you have to become a brand for people to trust you enough to buy the product.

3D manufacturing operations can bring calm to the chaos of the #creativeprocess. @hp @zbyhp Click To Tweet

I think you’ve been listening to our whole show, because that’s what we’ve been saying all along. Thank you for reinforcing that from an operation side.

To me, from a designer perspective that understands, respects and lives within the confines of manufacturing all the time, I’m excited about the Multi Jet Fusion 3D manufacturing aspect. I understand there is tremendous consistency from one machine to the next that you might have in different parts of the world. Whereas with fuse filament, there have always been many variables, whether they’re environmental or material quality variables and layer adhesion from one to the next. There are many different variables that can make even the same CAD file printed in one place or another significantly different. That’s problematic.

It is a challenge. Especially when technology’s new to get the same quality repeatability from material properties, from machine to machine, from continent to continent within the same machine from day-to-day, from one part of the print area to the other part of the print area. This science, which is becoming engineering is critical enabling that. Even when we look at what our people have been trying to do to support COVID with various bits and pieces, to support healthcare people. When you want to deliver these items to healthcare workers, there’s a regulatory framework that you have to go to.

They want to see consistency. We can innovate on maybe designers. You can innovate 100 times faster than regulatory approvals can be sought. This I think is a big challenge for the future because how do you make sure that the same part is the same part? This is one of the big things that us manufacturing people are obsessed about, so that the product you buy no matter where it’s made is the same. The last thing you want to have to do is rummage through and say, “Where was this made? Was it made on Monday or is it made on a Friday?” That kind of thing is what manufacturing must kill.

All manufacturing still has the same problems. You’re always trying to remove out all the variables in the process.

That is the beauty that we bring to complete the creative process, to provide something that people want to buy, whether it’s personalized and unique or it’s the same as every other one on the shelf. Consistency is important, and we’ve seen it. This is a face mask adjuster and people have been printing these all over. You have Scouts in Canada, the Singapore National Library, MakerBot community firing up their machines and you have HP, they’re super flexible. All fine things, but for us to be able to donate these, and we’ve done it in China, US, UK and now in Singapore, you have to go through an approval process because it’s used in the clinical setting, even though it’s no more than a hair accessory. To be able to do that is it’s quite a complex task. One of these that does worry me is this consistency and the regulatory process to get things through.

It’s always concerned us too. We completely understand that.

To see what Nicholas is holding up and how flexible it is, I can see that’s a very clean, fine made part.

 

There is this face mask adjuster. You put it behind your head to hold the ear loops away because precious source from long-term wearing a face marks are a real concern for people in clinical environment. The last thing you want is someone who is swabbing your nose to have a painful headache caused by prolonged wearing of a mask. This is something important. Since I mentioned it, nasal swabs.

It’s been a big topic of conversation we’ve been hearing.

I’ve been hearing about this but we haven’t seen them yet.

I can give you the name. They are now available for sale in the US. It’s an HP collaborative design. They’ve been through tests in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a hobbyist, Harbor Consortium. They are now available. One of the big problems to mass testing now for COVID-19 is the availability of nasal swabs. To get these through even an accelerated timeframe is not easy because it’s going into the body quite deep. You want to make sure that it’s biocompatible and you can sterilize it.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is in Boston. I happen to know that because I’m originally from there.

What we’ve been talking about may seem it’s off the sustainability topic. I want to clarify that for the readers because if we don’t get to some amount of decentralization, then we’re not going to get to the decarbonization, which is such an essential and growth area that we can be using. The two things are tied here. That’s why we wanted to have Nicholas talk about this because we wanted you to learn some of these factors that are going in. It’s not as easy as flipping a switch and changing the way everything works in manufacturing. It’s not like that.

It takes a lot of thought to be able to use 3D effectively in products that we use now. We have to think carefully. We’ve got to remember that the feedstock, whether it is filament or power is a lot more expensive than resin. To be able to adopt 3D and to get the benefits we want for sustainability. We’ve got to bear in mind the economics of it as well. Those have to scale and it won’t scale unless a thoughtful. If you take a design and you transform it into 3D, you can maybe do it remotely, but it’s going to be a more expensive than the part made with conventional technology. You can take that design and hollow out parts of it to make it lighter and you can use 3D to combine several pieces together. That’s better. The Holy Grail is where you go to this topological design where it looks like it’s enough of a spaceship, yet has the same anchor points and the same strength that’s needed. When you do that, you can get parts that are 95% lower carbon footprint, 93% lighter but they’re only today 50% cheaper.

The key there is to still make sure that they are consumer or industry acceptable at the end of the day. That’s our job as designers is to now make that work.

HP is enthusiastic about #3Dprinting because the shift from analog to digital is what we've seen in #2Dprinting for the last 30 years. @hp @zbyhp Click To Tweet

We’re talking about parts to begin to maybe inside the machine, rather than parts on the surface, but that is critical to enable the success. To do that, people have to unlearn almost everything they learned when they did their engineering degrees. Our designs now are constrained by how it’s going to be produced. That means holes you can drill from the top. We have to unlearn that to unlock possibilities.

There are new set of rules or I would prefer to say some new opportunities. I have a question for you. I’ve been looking forward to speaking with you because I know you have this knowledge from more of the manufacturing production side of things and we rarely get to talk to somebody like you. It’s easy for people to understand the sustainability improvements of distributed manufacturing. You’re going to ship things and use more fuel, that’s clear. You can make things differently that are hollowed out or a cellular honeycomb structure within them and reduce the amount of material. What can you share with us about the materials themselves that the Multi Jet Fusion technology prints with? Are those raw materials? Do they have a big carbon impact and how does it compare to other conventional materials?

The stuff we use, we have PA12, PA11, nylon. We’re starting to work with elastomers. We will be working with metals. We have some of that business running now. You can buy parts from our technology, from a couple of companies, which is a pilot manufacturing activity for us to understand the space better. We’ve already announced Metal Jet Fusion as the future platform to be serious about the manufacturing space, which is what HP is excited about. It’s pretty promising. One of the advantages we have, and maybe it’s the Multi Jet Fusion technology as well, is the parts are strong. They’re as strong as if they had been molded in a plastic injection mold. As you can see from the examples, they’re flexible. The material properties are extremely helpful in some applications. If you look at P11, P12, they’re nylon. They are as reusable, recyclable as any nylon product would be.

Anybody who understands injection molding process knows how much actual waste material that goes in to every one that’s molded. You always have all this material that gets pushed in on the way to the part but does not become the part and has to be re-grounded, maybe to be recycled. All the energy that goes into that. I’ve been a fan of 3D for ages.

We see the promise, but we also saw the design challenges and the acceptance in the marketplace. Things are starting to change and that’s been beautiful to see over the years that we’ve been doing this show. There’s been a lot of real investment that we’ve discovered as we’ve been doing this series with HP. I heard that it’s an $84 million HP-NTU digital manufacturing corporate lab that you’re in in Singapore. Its goal is to democratize digital manufacturing on a global scale. Tell us some about it, whatever you can.

I’ve been in Singapore for more than 30 years. One of the good things about being in this country is that it’s so small. It has no momentum on its own. It has no significant internal market. We have always had to respond quickly to any global changes. Inertia is very small and recognizing the future is becoming digital, not understanding what all that may produce. The government and HP have been working with Nanyang Technological University, NTU, which is one of the leading tech universities in Singapore and has established a lab. They have a bunch of Multi Jet Fusion printers to do more looks into applications, to do more looks into when you print on powder, what are the implications.

It’s such a new technology that we ourselves are understanding more about it as we do each iteration. To have those research programs and then look at areas not just 3D printing, but associated with that designs, how you protect intellectual property, how you lock that down, what that means for piracy and these kinds of things. Files, you can send them an email. How do you make sure that you can lock that down? If you buy an HP product or from another reputable company, and other companies do exist, how do you make sure that is from the right company? You can produce these deep fakes now where you have other people’s faces and it looks real. How do you do that? As much as it has promised for people to do rip offs and do irresponsible things to make a quick buck. That is a real challenge. That’s what that lab is tasked to look at in more detail.

I love that from a design side too because that has always been a concern for us in terms of design integrity. For us, we would design something and we were worried about putting our files out there because the printers are so inconsistent. You have like, “Is the design even going to be stable? Is it even going to work? Is it going to be worthwhile?”

 

On these face mask adjusters, the first batch that HP worked with Peak Sport in doing their design, it has written in Chinese, “Let’s go to war together,” which is suitable for giving to hospitals in Wuhan. It doesn’t work so well you don’t speak Chinese. That motto may not translate well into all languages. When we made them in Singapore, we changed the file. It now says, “SG united,” Singapore united, which is the country’s rallying cry. It’s that easy to change. I sent some to my sister in the UK who runs a medical center there, and it has the name of the medical Center on it. These fonts can be easy to modify. How do you make sure you have protected the design or your liability as a company?

I want to talk about the decarbonization. There have been some estimates that 1/3 of carbon emissions are related to manufacturing. What is 3D printing’s impact going to be on that? Do we have any estimates? Do we have any ideas and how long?

I don’t know myself what the estimate may be of that potential impact. If you ship a printer without some key parts, because they’re going to be the local parts and they’re going to make a difference to differentiate for the customer in the region, this 3D print may not help that much because the printer is the same size. It just has some parts missing. However, the more you can make your inventory near the customer, very flexible by having it more vanilla, the fewer wrong SKUs you’re going to ship from the central location, the more flexible the inventory will be. Inventory will go down, which companies want.

Also, the amount of rubbish that’s inevitably going to be scrapped and shipped across the ocean will go down. If you look at the printing world, 1/3 of all books printed are pulp. The better you can be, the better the quality, the more likely it is that you can do more and more of the product locally. However, products are complicated. They have printed circuits, light-emitting diodes, motors, belts and encoder chips so you know where the print head is on the printer. It’s very complex. The better 3D gets, the more chance we can reduce this. There are big opportunities in inventory reduction that will start to reduce the carbon footprint.

There’s still a challenge though in a long-term durability. When I was working at Herman Miller early on in the mid-‘90s, we were putting in drivers into their sustainability programs and looking at the green design. Cradle to grave and/or renewal was a really big part of that. Herman Miller was always proud. I’m sitting in one right now and this is 25 years old. The products last a long time and that’s something that our materials need to get up to standard on.

One of the things I like about our 3D process in HP is the parts have equivalent strength and durability. If now it’s injection molded, then the durability of our products is just as good as those are. The surface finish, because it’s printed on powder, isn’t as glossy and reflective as it can be in injection molding. They’re more used for internal parts, but you can do chemical polishing. You can paint them to give them an equivalent surface finish.

As branding people, we need to work harder on the consumers to get them to accept matte finish. Elon Musk might be helping us with that in the latest Tesla that’s all matte-finished. If matte-finished becomes a quality and desirable, we’ll be all set.

It requires a patina, which is unique to the user.

3D printer manufacturing is limited at the moment, so we need to widen the gamut. We need to make the #3Dmaterial properties better. @hp @zbyhp Click To Tweet

We’ve been talking about industry 4.0 or the fourth Industrial Revolution. Industry 4.0 is more what we’ve been talking about with Ed Davis and others. The benefits to sustainable production, empowering people local, new economic opportunities and including what we’re going to talk about in a couple of future episodes as we move forward into jobs and growth and thinking about all the different jobs that may be possible. One of the statistics that was given to us was 65% of children entering primary school will end up working in completely new jobs that don’t exist yet. I love that, it’s doesn’t scare me. I think that’s amazing.

It’s exciting, but we are relying on education systems in the world to help prepare kids for that world. That’s important. You have to learn the old ways and the new ways of how products are made to be able to be flexible. The skills that people have to acquire may be different. Everyone’s learning now how to connect remotely, which will be a big help in a lot of jobs and not necessarily all of them.

Our six-year-old certainly learned Zoom. She’s got it backwards and forwards already. It’s way before I expected it seeing she can’t completely read yet. We’re on a good path. The most interesting, and I want to say this, is that for a guy who’s in operations and manufacturing is going to be completely different, that’s hard to plan for. That’s hard to think about how you’re building factories and manufacturing processes for the future when you don’t even know what those future jobs are going to be or their future lives are going to look like.

It is challenging. COVID has made it even worse because it’s difficult to understand how my life’s going to be affected, what products are going to be needed, whether there’s going to be another wave of this. This kind of thing is going to happen again and again probably so we better become good at it. To some extent, as a manufacturing guy, this could be a terrifying prospect. I’d rather be involved in helping to create it than waiting at the end to be affected by it because there will be lots of opportunities that you see.

This whole thing of digital inventory, for us when you buy one of our large printers, we have to support it for five or more years after the last product is sold. Not after we stop making the product, which can be much later on. These spare parts that you have to have are going to be needed and in small quantities. You have a big economy of scale issue. You can’t fire up a mold just to print ten more parts. You end up with lifetime buys, which is a big bet because you can’t run out, but neither do you want to have too many. That’s an impossible calculation.

We’ve dealt with that in furniture a lot. Absolutely no one would do that.

The more you can digitalize your spare parts and print them where you need them, that is opportunity for people in those locations to be involved in activity where they add value, have less inventory, less carbon emitted and where less waste. We don’t end up throwing away a bunch of spare parts or scrapping them at the end of the support life for the product. That is a big opportunity. Things would change increasingly in our products. We have more bridge parts in the early phase of production, where the part is 3D printed and that avoids us having to iterate a plastic mold, which is expensive and wasteful. When we’re sure that that’s the right configuration for the part, then it gets made into an injection mold if the volumes are sufficient. That industry tool making may go down, but 3D printing may come up. The ability for people to switch from one skill to another skill and to enable that those parts to equivalent to the injection or departs that follow them and to be the same all over the world is critical. Standards of how we do that are still evolving and need to be a lot stronger.

Nicholas, I can’t thank you enough for coming on and talking with us. It’s wonderful to see a company and a man like you who’s in that position, who sees that bigger picture of the future and is planning for that.

 

It’s been a pleasure to be here and to talk to you both. Thank you.

3D Manufacturing Sustainability from Supply Chain Disruption to Digital Transformation — Final Thoughts

It’s hitting some hotspots for us, some things that matter. As he was talking, I’m thinking about all these shifts and manufacturing and what’s going on, there are certain people over the years that are awake. They’re awake and watching what’s going on. They’re noticing the shift and they’re paying attention to this change. I used to live up in Rochester, New York with Kodak. You think about Kodak, Xerox, and all of that, they were not paying attention to the shifts.

They did not want to change when the world changed around them.

When you have a company that’s looking at, “Here’s what happened in 2D and we were a part of that change. Now, 3D is coming in and we’re going to be a part of that change,” that’s a great mindset to begin with. Company mission as a whole that filters down to even the operations level, that is the most resistant to change. That’s fascinating. It’s got me thinking about that movie, Hidden Figures, which I absolutely love. I love the character who is in the manager of the human computers. She’s watching this IBM, big machine come in and she said, “We’re all going to be out of work.”

What did she do? She goes and teaches how to code.

Her name was Dorothy Vaughan. She did see it as a threat, but at the same time she took it as an opportunity and not only solidified her own job and career in NASA, but also a whole lot of jobs of many other people she took along with her.

That’s what we need to see happening here. Nicholas was pointing out that they’re looking and started seeing what’s going on being the canaries is out there for everybody going, “Here’s what’s happening. Here’s what’s going on. Here’s the jobs we’re going to need. Here’s the education shifts we’re going to need.” The ecosystem is starting to build up. As you listen to more episodes in the series, especially as we start to talk about education, design, software, and other things, you’re going to see how they’re laying the groundwork to accommodate this and make it happen, make it more smooth through the process. They’re being our Dorothy Vaughan in that way.

I hadn’t thought about it until you used the Kodak example. It is one that us in particular have been very well aware of over the course of our careers. We’ve seen a lot of other companies we’ve worked with that are not that large resist changes. That resistance to change ended up being a lot of companies undoing. Kodak is a great example. They invented digital photography and they could have owned that market and embraced it. Instead, they were trying to protect film production and the rest of the world innovated around them. Where is Kodak today? You hardly ever hear about them. It’s refreshing to see a company like HP with its own kind of history embrace 3D and making it something completely new, sustainable and making the future so exciting not only for them as a company, but for the rest of us as well.

We’ve been working with retailers. Look at the retailers, the same things are happening. We worked with many furniture companies, as we’ve mentioned over the episode. A lot of those furniture companies are completely gone and out of business because they didn’t want to shift to supporting the online sales and having Amazon as the client. They just wanted to stay with the big box stores and ship container loads.

There are big opportunities in #inventoryreduction that will start to reduce the carbon energy footprint. @hp @zbyhp Click To Tweet

How well is everybody doing selling through big box stores now with the situation that COVID-19? People are afraid to go buy in stores, so that isn’t such a safe bet.

This is the shift that we’re talking about. If you’re going to make a sustainable business, if you’re going to be a sustainable in helping the environment, helping move the economies through and making the sustainable economy, all of the sustainable jobs for our future, that word “sustainable” is a very strong and broad defined word. I love that Nicholas helped us define that in a broad way. Nicholas Smith and what they’re doing at HP with the mindset of flexibility of vision on the future and wanting to be a part of that future, it’s just phenomenal.

I believe seeing the opportunities that it presents, it’s exciting. I enjoyed that interview and I hope all of you did too. This was different than a lot of episodes we do in a good way.

We have many episodes in the series that we’re excited about. This is a tipping point early on in the series. I hope you’re going to join us for all of them. We have the whole series laid out as the new episodes launch. If you’re finding this after they’re all launched, they’re all laid out on the website 3DStartPoint.com/HP.

Some of these parts that they’ve made in the HP Multi Jet Fusion Printers, you can see it on the video. You want to go check that out.

You can jump right to that. All those things in all of the series, everything is at 3DStartPoint.com. You’re going to be able to find them. There are images, resources and all kinds of other things. One of the things that they have is HP Sustainability Impact Report. You’ll be able to get that, download it and read some more about their sustainability impact that they’re having around the world, what they’re trying to do and their mission and goals for the future. Everyone, I hope you’ve been enjoying the series already as much as we are and I hope you’re going to join us for the rest of it because it’s got a lot of great data and interesting people that we’re going to introduce you to that you’ve probably never heard from before.

There are lots more to come, stay tuned. We’ll see you next time on the next episode.

 

Get Even More!

Learn more about the HP Multi Jet Fusion Technology.

 

Important Links

• HP
• Nicholas Smith
• 3DStartPoint.com/HP
• Article on Digitally Manufacturing a More Sustainable Future
• Sustainable Impact at HP

 

More About HP

Capture and Create with Z by HP, Inspiring you for your next creative breakthrough with the Z portfolio designed and built to improve the way you create. Discover the latest Z Book to help you with your latest creative project.

Experience your design with HP Multi Jet Fusion technology and solutions reinvent design and manufacturing, unlocking the full potential of 3D printing and bringing down the barriers of 3D printing adoption across industries through materials innovation. For more details about Multi Jet Fusion technology click here.

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