Scaling a Service Bureau: Production at Dongguan YuenCheng Technology

Service bureaus are often the best way to analyze trends in manufacturing, and in additive manufacturing especially. As service providers, they are fielding requests across different industries and for a wide range of parts, materials, and processes — and they’re handling more 3D printing volume than most original product manufacturers. Wohlers estimates that 60% of 3D printing output in China comes from contract manufacturers and 3D printing service bureaus. 

Dongguan YuenCheng Technology (DYT), a service bureau in South China, has seen a gradual shift away from requests for prototypes printed in photopolymers towards a demand for strong, functional, end-use parts, primarily printed on powder bed fusion systems. Dongguan YuenCheng has been able to stay one step ahead of the demand curve by scaling their 3D printing fleet with Formlabs’ accessible Fuse Series selective laser sintering (SLS) printers.

DYT works primarily with small and medium-sized businesses who are looking for 3D printed parts with versatile material properties, excellent dimensional accuracy and precision, and options for moving to production volumes efficiently.  

They began to evaluate options for adding industrial power 3D printing technologies, but had three major concerns with many of the available industrial options:

1. The high up-front cost of large-format industrial options would preclude them from any ramp-up time — they would need to start making a profit on parts immediately to begin to pay off their investment. 

2. The high labor cost of experienced powder bed fusion 3D printing operators — most industrial options are complex and require operators to have extensive training and experience. 

3. Despite high costs, part consistency and quality were not guaranteed with expensive industrial options. 

Alex Wu, the CEO of DYT led an effort to compare each possible option for functional, end-use quality parts. DYT looked at several factors, including dimensional accuracy, tolerances, and the consistency of those results across different machines and materials, as well as the after-sales service that different OEMs provided. When running an analysis on the overall cost-effectiveness of the machines, the Fuse Series SLS 3D printers achieved a complete ROI in half the time that other, higher-priced options did. DYT concluded that the Fuse Series offered a combination of part quality, scalability, and workflow efficiency that the other options couldn’t match.

Though up-front cost is often the biggest ticket item when analyzing fabrication technology options, DYT was also concerned with cost per part, and how that would factor into their daily operations and customer relations. 

As accessible and scalable systems like the Fuse Series are gaining popularity, more businesses are realizing that SLS 3D printing presents a compelling opportunity for end-use production at certain volumes. For stop-gap printing, early customer validation runs, aftermarket parts that need to be updated regularly, or for mass customization, 3D printing is typically less expensive than ordering an injection molding tool, and almost always delivers parts faster than the tool can be machined. 

The exact point at which injection molding becomes cheaper depends on material choice, geometry and size, surface finish requirements, and more. However, for many manufacturers making nylon, TPU, or polypropylene parts that can nest several at a time into the Fuse Series build chambers, it is often cheaper to produce several thousand parts on the Fuse Series than to order an injection molding tool. 

For DYT, they had the additional considerations of the ease and cost-effectiveness of Chinese domestic manufacturers. When comparing parts to those printed on the Fuse Series, they found that though costs were competitive, part quality and dimensional accuracy were far better with the Fuse Series. Being able to consistently produce parts with a 0.1 mm to 0.15 mm tolerance outperformed any domestic powder or powder bed fusion printer they had evaluated. 
 

DYT has plans to scale their SLS fleet up to 20 machines from the three Fuse Series printers they operate now. The feedback they’ve received so far from their current customers ordering Fuse Series SLS parts has made them confident that demand for these products will only continue to grow. 

This forward-looking approach was part of the reasons they chose to scale with the Fuse Series, rather than another industrial option. While larger format powder bed 3D printers often have larger build volumes that can nest more individual parts within them, they often require four or five times the footprint and infrastructure that the Fuse Series printers do. 

Wu and the DYT team knew that they needed a solution that could comfortably scale, so that they could add printers as their demand and customer base grew. Having a fleet of SLS 3D printers differentiates them from their competition because it enables them to offer multiple materials and increases their flexibility and ability to meet tight deadlines. Operating a fleet gives them access to more of the Formlabs SLS Powders library, without requiring them to switch over printers or post-processing machines like the Fuse Sift. 

To learn more about scaling production with the Fuse Series, visit our resources page. To test out the material properties for yourself, request a free sample.