To anyone who hasn’t seen it demonstrated,
3-D printing sounds futuristic—like the meals that materialized in the
Jetsons’ oven at the touch of a keypad. But the technology is quite
straightforward: It is a small evolutionary step from spraying toner on
paper to putting down layers of something more substantial (such as
plastic resin) until the layers add up to an object. And yet, by
enabling a machine to produce objects of any shape, on the spot and as
needed, 3-D printing really is ushering in a new era.
As
applications of the technology expand and prices drop, the first big
implication is that more goods will be manufactured at or close to their
point of purchase or consumption. This might even mean household-level
production of some things. (You’ll pay for raw materials and the IP—the
software files for any designs you can’t find free on the web.) Short of
that, many goods that have relied on the scale efficiencies of large,
centralized plants will be produced locally. Even if the per-unit
production cost is higher, it will be more than offset by the
elimination of shipping and of buffer inventories. Whereas cars today
are made by just a few hundred factories around the world, they might
one day be made in every metropolitan area. Parts could be made at
dealerships and repair shops, and assembly plants could eliminate the
need for supply chain management by making components as needed.
Another
implication is that goods will be infinitely more customized, because
altering them won’t require retooling, only tweaking the instructions in
the software. Creativity in meeting individuals’ needs will come to the
fore, just as quality control did in the age of rolling out sameness.
These
first-order implications will cause businesses all along the supply,
manufacturing, and retailing chains to rethink their strategies and
operations. And a second-order implication will have even greater
impact. As 3-D printing takes hold, the factors that have made China the
workshop of the world will lose much of their force.
China
has grabbed outsourced-manufacturing contracts from every mature
economy by pushing the mass-manufacturing model to its limit. It not
only aggregates enough demand to create unprecedented efficiencies of
scale but also minimizes a key cost: labor. Chinese government
interventions have been pro-producer at every turn, favoring the growth
of the country’s manufacturers over the purchasing power and living
standards of its consumers.
Under
a model of widely distributed, highly flexible, small-scale
manufacturing, these daunting advantages become liabilities. No
workforce can be paid little enough to make up for the cost of shipping
across oceans. And few managers raised in a pro-producer climate have
the consumer instincts to compete on customization.
It
seems that the United States and other Western countries, almost in
spite of themselves, will pull off the old judo technique of exploiting a
competitor’s lack of balance and making its own massive weight
instrumental in its fall.
China
won’t be a loser in the new era; like every nation, it will have a
domestic market to serve on a local basis, and its domestic market is
huge. And not all products lend themselves to 3-D printing. But China
will have to give up on being the mass-manufacturing powerhouse of the
world. The strategy that has given it such political heft won’t serve it
in the future.
The great
transfer of wealth and jobs to the East over the past two decades may
have seemed a decisive tipping point. But this new technology will
change again how the world leans.
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Posted by:
Okky Eldiana Muliaputri
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