The counterintuitive truth about scaling additive manufacturing operations
When most AM service providers hit capacity constraints, their first instinct is to buy more printers. More machines equal more output, right?
After working with dozens of 3D printing facilities worldwide, we’ve learned this approach often misses the biggest opportunity for sustainable growth. The real leverage isn’t in adding capacity—it’s in optimizing what you already have.
The Hidden Bottleneck That’s Limiting Your Growth
“The bottlenecks in the industry right now are largely in the post-processing side, so everything after the printer. While we continue to grow, we can not just add human labor to continue to simply sort parts.“
Steve Grundahl, former CEO of Midwest Prototyping
Bart Van der Schueren, CTO at Materialise, adds important context: “As companies scale their AM operations, they increasingly rely on automation. However, the potential to scale is limited by the post-processing, which today is still mostly a manual process. If you want to scale production, the only way forward is to automate post-processing… but that’s easier said than done.”
The key insight? Automation is absolutely essential for scaling—but it delivers exponentially better results when built on optimized processes.
Why Process Optimization Supercharges Automation Success
Here’s what separates successful automation implementations from expensive disappointments: process clarity before technology deployment.
Markus May, CEO of 3Faktur, understood this principle: “We want to strengthen our value proposition by lowering cost and optimizing lead time through business and manufacturing automation. We rather invest at an early stage; it is harder to change processes once we run 10 machines and increase the headcount.”
Smart strategy. Because automation amplifies whatever process you feed it. Feed it an optimized workflow, and you get exponential improvements. Feed it a fragmented process, and you automate inefficiency at machine speed.
The Compound Effect of Getting Workflow Right First
Most manufacturers don’t realize how much process inefficiency costs them until they measure it systematically. We regularly discover:
- Parts waiting 2-3 days between process steps that should flow continuously
- 30-40% of operator time spent on non-value-added activities like searching and waiting
- Quality issues caught downstream after significant value has been added
- Information bottlenecks that slow decision-making and create delays
These aren’t dramatic failures—they’re the friction points that limit how effectively any automation solution can perform.
What Happens When Process Understanding Meets Smart Technology
When i-SOLIDS deeply understood their workflow challenges and combined that knowledge with strategic technology implementation, the results were transformative: production output increased by 70% in six months, while non-conformance rates dropped from 1.6% to below 0.7%.
Neither process insight alone nor technology alone would have delivered these results—it was the combination that created transformation.
The Foundation-First Approach That Maximizes Automation ROI
The companies scaling most successfully follow a strategic sequence:
Step 1: Document Current Reality Map every handoff, measure every cycle time, identify every decision point. You can’t optimize what you can’t see clearly.
Step 2: Eliminate Process Inefficiencies Remove unnecessary steps, reduce handoffs, and create clear information flow before introducing automation.
Step 3: Standardize Optimized Processes Create repeatable, documented workflows that can be executed consistently—this becomes your automation foundation.
Step 4: Automate Strategically Deploy technology to enhance your optimized processes, focusing on repetitive, high-volume activities with the biggest impact.
This sequence doesn’t delay automation—it ensures automation delivers maximum value from day one.
The Competitive Advantage of Process-Ready Automation
In today’s manufacturing environment, short lead times and consistent quality aren’t nice-to-have—they’re competitive necessities. Customers expect fast delivery as the norm, not the exception.
Companies that optimize first, then automate strategically, can respond faster, scale more predictably, and deliver more consistently. They turn process excellence into the foundation for automation success.
Where Most Automation Investments Fall Short
The biggest mistake isn’t choosing the wrong technology—it’s implementing powerful automation solutions on top of unclear processes.
When workflows exist only in people’s heads, automation systems can’t adapt to the real complexity of production. The result? Technology that works perfectly in demos but struggles in daily operations.
The second mistake? Assuming manual processes that work at a small scale will translate directly to automated systems. What works with human flexibility often needs process redesign to work with automation precision.
Building Your Automation-Ready Foundation
Before your next automation investment, ensure you can answer these questions:
- Do we have documented, standardized workflows that automation can follow?
- Can we measure cycle time and identify bottlenecks at each process step?
- Do we know exactly where and why parts wait between operations?
- Are our quality checkpoints positioned to give automation the data it needs?
- Can our processes run consistently without relying on tribal knowledge?
If these fundamentals aren’t in place, even the best automation technology will underperform its potential.
The Integration Opportunity
The companies winning in additive manufacturing aren’t choosing between process optimization and automation—they’re using process optimization to make automation more powerful.
Clear workflows become the roadmap for automation implementation. Standardized processes become the foundation for consistent automated execution. Measured baselines become the benchmark for automation ROI.
Ready to Scale Smarter?
Process optimization isn’t a delay before automation—it’s the multiplier that makes automation investments pay off exponentially.
The insights from systematic workflow analysis often reveal automation opportunities that weren’t obvious before. More importantly, they ensure those automation solutions integrate seamlessly into operations that are already running efficiently.
The best time to optimize your workflow was before your first automation project. The second-best time is before your next one.
What’s your experience with process optimization? Have you found that workflow clarity makes technology implementations more successful? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
About AM-Flow: We help additive manufacturing companies build the process foundation that makes automation investments more successful. Our workflow evaluation services identify optimization opportunities and create the clear, standardized processes that enable seamless technology integration.