Why Additive Manufacturing Has Finally Earned Its Place on the Production Line

• For years, the conversation around additive manufacturing followed a predictable script. Engineers would acknowledge its usefulness for prototyping – faster iterations, cheaper design validation, no tooling to worry about –...

For years, the conversation around additive manufacturing followed a predictable script. Engineers would acknowledge its usefulness for prototyping – faster iterations, cheaper design validation, no tooling to worry about – and then pivot back to injection moulding or CNC machining for anything that needed to be made at scale. That script is now out of date. The shift is not sudden. It has been building steadily, driven by compounding improvements in machine reliability, materials qualification, post-processing capability, and, critically, economics. But there is a point at which gradual change becomes a new reality, and for additive manufacturing in serial production, we have reached it. The repeatability problem has been solved The most persistent objection to additive in production h