How Avid Product Development Creates Efficiencies in High-Mix, Low-Volume Additive Manufacturing

Inside Avid Product Development’s facility in Loveland, Colorado, the company’s six Multi Jet Fusion (MJF) 3D printers hum along in two tidy rows, printing parts in nylon and TPU (specifically, Lubrizol TPU — more on that in a moment) . Unpacking stations line the walls, and off to the side sits a newer, automated unpacking machine that extracts parts and reclaims powder without human supervision. Multiple build units stand ready to be swapped into a printer at a moment’s notice. In adjacent rooms, specialized equipment for smoothing, polishing and dyeing MJF prints provides low-touch, repeatable finishing.

The production floor is sparsely populated, and there is a set-it-and-forget-it feel to the space that signals efficiency. Much of the work of printing, unpacking and postprocessing individual parts has been automated through the capacity above, leaving the company’s team of mostly engineers free to do other things — design and redesign parts for additive, interface with customers, engineer workflows for new products, and devise solutions to downstream process challenges. Because while part production is largely optimized and automated, the company is engaged not just in delivering 3D printed parts, but finished products.

True to its name, Avid Product Development’s manufacturing capacity is primarily devoted to prototypes and product development, with bridge and serial production making up a smaller portion of the company’s work. The automation and efficiencies the company has invested in are thus dedicated largely to high-mix, low-volume manufacturing, even in most production cases, rather than to mass production of a few repeating parts.

Creating this versatile efficiency enables the company to serve long-standing customers as effectively as clients bringing their first products to market, and to also support the postprocessing, finishing and assembly steps that finished products require. I recently visited Avid to learn how the company strikes this balance using additive manufacturing.

Engineering Expertise from Development Through Production

Avid Product Development has its roots in a consulting company started by Doug Collins; Ryan Billson joined Collins as cofounder in 2016. The two mechanical engineers developed a business around product development, design and prototyping with 3D printing. The company acquired its first industrial 3D printers, two HP 4200 Multi Jet Fusion machines, in 2017 and quickly filled the printers with orders. While product development has always been part of the company’s name and DNA, the addition of this industrially focused AM capacity represented a shift in the balance of work, to support production as well as development. It also kicked off a growth spurt.

“We started adopting automation at our old location because we didn’t have room for more people,” Billson says, citing some of the postprocessing machines listed above. “It was about space initially. We couldn’t scale otherwise.”

The business grew and was acquired by materials supplier Lubrizol in 2020; Avid moved to its current location in 2022 and today employs 25 at its 13,500-square-foot-facility. Most of the headcount is still made up of mechanical engineers, whose expertise is key to both developing products and moving them into production.

Avid’s primary role within Lubrizol is to serve as engineering expertise for 3D printing with the latter’s materials — but this happens alongside its normal activities as a parts provider. Avid Product Development operates relatively independently much as it always has, and while the company commonly prints with Lubrizol’s thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU), it is free to use other polymers from other material manufacturers as the application dictates. Rather than a captive manufacturing operation, Avid is something like a powerhouse of 3D printing expertise that Lubrizol and its material users can tap into.

“We act as a full engineering team that can do end-to-end development,” Billson says, “whether Avid, Lubrizol or a third party ends up printing the final parts.”

Balancing Prototyping and Production

While Avid’s specialty is in the initial development of parts and products, the company balances this activity now with production work, much of which is ongoing, repeat orders.

“We get more orders for prototyping, but most of our revenue comes from production runs,” says Brittney Frank, sales developer.

One of the largest of these ongoing production jobs is an electronics enclosure that Avid 3D prints with MJF. While the part design is fairly simple and could be suitable for injection molding at the quantities needed, the client requires enclosures that can fit a range of products and support ongoing design changes. Avid retains this job as additive production because of the variety required, the fact that the enclosure parts nest easily into an MJF build, and the value-added services it can provide to the customer.

For example, after printing and postprocessing are complete, Avid Product Development installs multiple heat-fit inserts into each enclosure, placing somewhere around 10,000 inserts per month. Again, the company’s penchant for creating efficiencies is evident — to make the installation easier, the engineering team has developed specialized jigs that make it possible to quickly heat each area of the part with a soldering iron and place the inserts.

Other production jobs embody the concept of mass customization, such as cranial remolding orthoses used to correct head shape in infants. Produced for Invent Medical, each orthosis resembling a helmet is custom-made and features a two-in-one design. The frame can hold two different pop-in panels that can be swapped out depending on the stage of care. Avid Product Development has a turnaround time of just 48 hours for these patient-specific items.

While recurring production work like this is growing, the company nonetheless retains its specialty in helping customers get new products off the ground. One such product Avid has helped develop is called “The Overcomer,” sold by School Specialties.

The device is a motion amplifier that enables individuals with mobility challenges to swing athletic equipment such as a golf club, hockey stick or teeball bat by moving a lever rather than handling the object directly. The adaptive sports device is constructed from extruded aluminum (sourced from a supplier) and about 15 different nylon 3D printed parts that Avid manufactures. A printed planetary gear assembly inside the primary joint provides a five-to-one rotational advantage, making it easier for the user hit the ball or puck farther.

The Overcomer’s creator came to Avid Product Development with an initial design that he wanted to make affordable and manufacturable. Avid worked with the client to dial in the design so that it would be suitable for MJF and producible at the desired price point. Today the company manufactures the device as needed in an end-to-end process, from printing the key components to final assembly in-house.

Managing High Variety

Supporting everything from product development through serial production means that Avid Product Development prints and manages a wide range of parts each week. The company has developed strategies around this fact that help ensure that each part is successfully printed, handled and tracked according to its final application.

CO-AM software from Materialise is used to manage data about every part, including the machine it was printed on and the lot of powder it was produced from. Each part is inspected right after printing and depowdering to ensure that only good parts go on to polishing, dyeing or additional postprocessing.

But for the variety of parts Avid manufactures, the pursuit of quality begins well before printing in how builds are nested and batched. Avid prefers to keep production runs and like parts together in the same batches. This makes downstream processing more straightforward, Billson explains, because each build must be handled according to its most delicate part. Mixed batches that include parts of varying wall thickness and feature sizes can lead to unnecessary slowdowns in unpacking and postprocessing to avoid damaging the less robust items.

Another consideration to batching effectively is managing the thermal load inside the printer by carefully considering the density of each build of parts.

“We shoot for about 12% packing density with PA12 nylon,” Billson says, by way of example. Keeping density relatively high ensures that space is used efficiently within the envelope, and helps the build heat (and cool) evenly for prints with reliable quality.

A Different Take on Automation

While Avid Product Development has ongoing production that can be considered high-volume such as the electronics enclosures, most of its work involves high-mix, low-volume manufacturing — and the company is comfortable with this. Despite the range of parts and unique workflows attached to each product, Avid Product Development has put in place tools that make it possible to automate and ensure consistency across batches and jobs.

While the facility doesn’t house any robots or other obvious signs of automation, Avid is a clear example of how the right equipment, software and procedures can set human engineers free to perform high-value tasks, because the tedious and repetitive ones are largely handled. Automated unloading allows engineers to walk away, design the next project or finish the previous one while parts are excavated from the powder. Specialized dyeing machines from Girbau and DyeMansion, and AMT PostPro3D and SF50 systems for vapor smoothing, help the company provide consistent, predictable surface finishes by utilizing repeatable programs, rather than expecting operators to consistently execute recipes in a homegrown dye station, for instance. Avid Product Development can be an expert in product development, partly because it has become so efficient at production.

That’s why developing the end-to-end workflow for new products is worthwhile, even if they will go on to be made in some other way. For items like the Overcomer, which is needed in low volumes, and the infant helmets, which could only be made custom on such a short timeline additively, Avid Product Development will carry on as the production provider through additive manufacturing. But for many more of the products it sees through development, the company will help to hand off production to a different provider (sometimes, the client will take 3D printing capacity in-house) or to a different process.

The majority of products that come through Avid Product Development will not stay additive, Billson says, and that’s ok. Nevertheless, the company is looking toward a future that involves more additive manufacturing, specifically more production of end-use parts. When I visited, the company was preparing to add a seventh 3D printer to its space, and Billson revealed that there is room for as many as a dozen of these machines in the future.