Ultimaker Faces AM Challenges Head-On and Thrives During Trying Times

Accepting the reality that in-person trade shows and interviews are out of the question right now and into the foreseeable future, via Zoom we recently interviewed Greg Elfering, President of Ultimaker Americas. During the course of the interview, he spoke how the company is adapting to changing market conditions for 3D printing/additive manufacturing (AM) as it continues to innovate with its hardware and software products and services.

When asked for a little background, Elfering said, “Ultimaker is a company that was founded on 3D printing [also known as additive manufacturing] hardware and software technologies. We’re based in Utrecht, Netherlands, and headquartered here in the United States just outside of Boston in Waltham, Massachusetts. We’ve been in the American market for approximately five years.”

“Prior to joining Ultimaker, I was with 3D Systems for 15 years. I joined a year and a half ago and I had a chance to learn the business for a year, understand our products and resellers. I was given a chance in January to take over the responsibility as President for the Americas. So, I’m six months into this position with Ultimaker.”

MCADCafe Interviews Greg Elfering, President of Ultimaker Americas

Since 2011, Ultimaker has built an open and easy-to-use solution of 3D printers, software, and materials for professional designers and engineers.

Ultimaker 3D Printers

Ultimaker has a wide range of 3D printing products, software, and materials. Elfering said, “Our technology is based on Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) technology. We are unique in the sense that we’re an open platform, meaning our software is essentially G-code-driven and our machines are G-code-driven. Our printers are able to accommodate third-party materials, so we do not make them proprietary.

Our most recent product line was the S series, which was the S5 and we extended that with the new S3 at the end of last year. We also extended the S series platform with the air manager and the material handling station for the S5, which makes it a closed system, humidity controlled, extensive capabilities with auto-loading materials, switching materials.”

Ultimaker’s 3D printers include:

• Ultimaker S5 Pro Bundle
• Ultimaker S5
• Ultimaker S3
• Ultimaker 2+

“And you have, of course, the ability to, at this point, add over 200 third-party materials to that type of system. We improved the whole product line this year by launching Essentials, a software product that’s based on our Cura software that allows us to network printers in a very safe and secure way. It’s white hat tested, so it essentially allows customers to move data in the cloud, and drive 3D printers all over the world or drive a print farm of hundreds of printers from a single PC.”

Diverse and Unique Ultimaker Markets

When asked what Ultimaker’s 3D printers primarily used for and what are some of the markets where they’re used in, Elfering said, “There are four primary applications or markets that we focus on; transportation, for one, is a relatively broad category for automotive, aerospace. But with our product line, it also focuses on fleets. So things like UPS and Federal Express, Hertz, areas where there was a lot of quantity of objects and it makes sense for a company to use 3D printing as part of a maintenance program with those types of products.

For example, UPS and FedEx are using it to make everything from fixtures that would be used in loading airplanes and loading trucks and unloading trucks. They would make adaptations to reduce or eliminate repetitive motion injuries, they would use it to make spare parts that may be OEM supplied.

The company that is supplying some of the material handling equipment may have grippers or box grabbing accessories that automate the box moving process. Those parts are all ware components, and you either have to have those components on the shelf ready for your maintenance person to change them out, or what Ultimaker allows our customers to do is if they have the data, they can simply print more of those parts. And that’s a growing part of our business — B2B and enterprise. The ability to make real parts and give our customers the ability to distribute them to their sites around the world.

In the food and beverage industry, we’ve had a lot of success recently, specifically with Heineken, but also with some other OEMs. For beverage companies, they use Ultimaker technologies for their filling and packaging equipment.

Everything around that type of operation is measured in uptime. If they’re late with a delivery to Walmart because their production line went down for six hours, they’re going to receive a penalty. So everything in that operation is measured around uptime, and a 3D printer allows them to keep an inventory of critical parts. And as they replace one, they go ahead and print a replacement. And so they always have that ability to make one quickly, but they always have that ability to pull it off the shelf as well. It’s become part of their standard workflow. It’s how they now run a beverage facility to maximize uptime.”

Ultimaker Software: Cura, Essentials, and Other Resources

Ultimaker Cura is one of the world’s most popular 3D printing software. At its heart is Ultimaker Cura’s open-source slicing engine, built through years of in-house development and user contributions. Some of Cura’s most significant features and capabilities include:

• Intent profiles print specific applications at the click of a button
• Recommended profiles tested for thousands of hours ensure reliable results
• “Custom mode” provides over 400 settings for granular control of 3D printers
• Regular updates constantly improve features and printing experience

Cura can be integrated with several popular CAD applications, including SolidWorks, Siemens NX, and Autodesk Inventor.

Editor’s Note: I have used Cura for a few years and have found it to be easy to learn and use, and enhancements are frequently being added to the software on a regular basis.

Elfering said, “Our company has put some solid resources into Cura, you can download Cura for free from our website so you can start to get an exposure to our software without any financial commitment. This is why it’s so successful in schools. A lot of education curriculum is pulled from our website, there’s case studies there, there are material data sheets and application studies. There’s a wealth of information including a material selector guide. If you want a material that is high temperature, FDA clear, you can select those requirements and it will narrow it down to a library of materials that fit those criteria. The Ultimaker website is really a wealth of product information, software download ability, and then also just application and curriculum availability. It’s really a very comprehensive and supportive site for contact.”

Last month, Ultimaker, launched Ultimaker Essentials, a new software solution created to aid companies in overcoming major barriers in the adoption of additive manufacturing. Ultimaker Essentials enables companies to incorporate 3D printing in existing IT infrastructures and allows for seamless distribution and updating of 3D printing software. The paid subscription-based software offering addresses several IT pain-points, including the need for improve management across workflows and the knowledge gap that exists in the manufacturing industry.

A major concern within enterprise IT departments is the ability to successfully and centrally manage distribution 3D printing software. Ultimaker Essentials addresses this issue by ensuring updates and plugins are rolled out across users in an organization at the same time. This streamlines the process, providing better control across multiple 3D printers in an organization.

Ultimaker Essentials is software that controls both individual 3D printing machines as well as “farms” of Ultimaker printers.

Elfering said, “One interesting application for Essentials is the Heineken example. You have some engineers in a corporate facility who are buying similar equipment that’s being placed at multiple facilities around the world. There are some spare parts or common parts that can be shared with all Heineken facilities around the world. What Heineken has done is they’ve deployed Ultimaker printers, a specific configuration, when they place those printers on the network, Ultimaker Essentials will handshake with those printers. It will automatically load them with the engineering profiles that Heineken engineering has qualified, and that plant will be making parts to a spec that is controlled by engineering at the headquarters.

What this allows Heineken to do is to take their CAD data for some of these replacement parts, share them with their sites around the world and actually make high-quality parts in places like South Africa and Brazil, in the Americas, Mexico, and get the same quality output that they proved out at their engineering facility back at their headquarters. That’s a good example of distributed printing and Essentials really enables customers to do that securely and very easily.

As one of the core pillars of Industry 4.0, 3D printing is an essential part of progressive business solutions and processes,” said Jos Burger, CEO at Ultimaker. “In the wake of the recent pandemic, companies need to quickly realize, if they haven’t already, that global supply chains and manufacturing workflows can be easily disrupted. The transition to digital distribution and local manufacturing is now imminent and more imperative than ever. The Ultimaker Essentials launch is targeted at addressing these gaps and removing the final barriers in adoption of 3D printing.

Ultimaker Essentials also includes a new direct support function and a catalogue of verified plugins to help effectively scale 3D Printing outputs. Subscribing to Ultimaker Essentials provides organizations with an enterprise grade solution for adopting a full 3D printing infrastructure.

As part of the Ultimaker Essential package, users have access to three eLearning courses from the Ultimaker 3D Printing Academy. Ultimaker’s 2019 3D Printing Sentiment Index found that 69 percent of the professionals surveyed cited knowledge as the most frequent barrier, of which, 40 percent brought up a lack of necessary skillsets to properly leverage 3D printing. The Ultimaker 3D Printing Academy helps overcome these barriers with specifically curated and developed content catered. Courses in the Ultimaker 3D Printing Academy, ranging from novice to expert level, is available separate from Ultimaker Essentials.

Ultimaker Differentiators

We asked Elfering what makes Ultimaker products and solutions unique and differentiated in the marketplace.

He responded by saying, “Ultimaker has a reputation for being extremely easy to use. Our engineers focus on an out-of-box experience, you should be up and printing in about 20 minutes of opening the box. The printers are well-built, and the combination of those two – easy to use and well-built – we have a reputation for being very reliable. Customers have a very strong cause and effect, they know if they feed foam into the printer and they know if it’s up to temperature, they know if they use a particular profile, that will work. That will create good parts for them and the device is reliable and consistent, again, well-built so that part of the equation of 3D printing has eliminated a lot of frustrations, it’s made it easy for our customers, it’s made it easy for customers to deploy these to folks who don’t know how to 3D print.

That’s the other part of Essentials. Essentials has some e-learning built into it where you can offer your employees training on how to use that device as part of their interface with the software. They can have a username and a password to an account that will teach them actually how to run specific materials, teach them out to load filament, teach them how to replace print cores, that type of e-learning is available through the Essentials platform.”

Ultimaker Materials

As far as materials go, Ultimaker machines support a wide variety of materials.

“The only materials Ultimaker does not support are materials that cannot pass a qualification in our material alliance program,” Elfering said. “We have a unique capability with Ultimaker. Because we’re an open system, we have gone out to all the chemical companies and said, ‘Listen, one of the biggest challenges that customers have is learning how to run your material.’”

We ask those chemical companies to step up and put engineering resources into developing a profile so that when an Ultimaker customer chooses to run a BASF material or chooses to run a DSM material, or chooses to run an Ultimaker material, they can pull up a profile from the Cura Marketplace. This is a free service that Ultimaker offers, that ensures that the profile has been validated. In other words, if it’s been done through Essentials, it’s secure, meaning you’re not bringing any IT threats into your network.

It works, and it’s been proven by the material OEMs through our material alliance, that that profile will produce a high-quality part. In the past, most 3D printing companies either restricted customers from doing that, or they said, “You’re on your own with that homework, we don’t wanna be involved in it.” And so Ultimaker has given our customers a way to run these third-party materials, get good results, get the mechanical properties they want, and coincidentally, it’s also extremely cost-effective. Our technology is growing because we have one of the lowest total cost of ownership.”

Ultimaker’s Response to COVID-19

As countries worldwide face the challenge of managing the COVID-19 pandemic Ultimaker is making its global network of 3D printing hubs, experts, and designers directly available to hospitals in need of tools and applications that are short in supply and can be quickly produced with 3D printing. Through Ultimaker.com, hospitals can now learn the location of available 3D printing hubs nearby. And direct contact is offered with Ultimaker and local 3D printing experts and designers to advise and support on creating and obtaining the parts they need most.

Elfering said, “Ultimaker was key in the very early days of our country’s initial response to COVID, I should say our worldwide response to COVID. The company formed on its intranet, a location that both people with 3D printers could go and pull files, they essentially were pulling files from the National Institute of Health (NIH), and were matched up with hospitals that were asking for that PPE equipment. Most of these requests were for visors, face protectors, ear savers with the face masks on. Nurses on long shifts, their ears get raw, so we developed a device to take that pressure off their ears and make it more comfortable to wear all this PPE for long periods of time. For the first few weeks of the pandemic, none of that existed in the traditional supply chain.

3D printing stepped up and made all that stuff and was supplying it to customers in real time. And our website acted as kind of a handshake for people who wanted to volunteer and offer help, but also, it acted as a portal for people to say, ‘Hey, please send us some of that stuff, we need it.’”

We asked Elfering, how is both Ultimaker as well as internal and external business being impacted by COVID-19 now?

“Initially, I would say the business had a slight bump from all the PPE activity, people were really running their printers extensively – it’s since normalized”, he said. Education is also a big market for Ultimaker. Now, the schools have really been affected by this COVID crisis, so there’s uncertainty in our business around the education part, but what we have seen as an additional response to COVID is the supply chains of companies got reconciled. When China shut down for a period of time, it was difficult to get spare parts, motors, printed circuit boards. Those types of products and complex parts, a big red flag went up that, ‘Hey, listen, if we have a very stretched out supply chain, we’re going be exposed.’”

Ultimaker has benefited from companies trying to make at least some of the basic parts internally using 3D printers, and our technology is well-positioned for that using functional materials, such as nylons, polycarbonate, and ABS. It’s a well-positioned device to be used as a way to 3D print functional parts.”

While some AM manufacturers have struggled during these challenging times, Ultimaker has thrived because its products are used in several markets that might not be the first that come to mind with regard to 3D printing.

From the beginning, the company’s mission has been to accelerate the world’s transition to local manufacturing and digital distribution. And thanks to its talented team, that’s just what it’s doing.

For More Information: Ultimaker

Tags: 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AM, Cura Marketplace, FFF, Fused Filament Fabrication, Ultimaker, Ultimaker 2+, Ultimaker Cura, Ultimaker Essentials, Ultimaker S3, Ultimaker S5, Ultimaker S5 Bundle

Category: Interview

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