Jabil (St. Petersburg, FL) has introduced an additive manufacturing network to drive greater manufacturing speed and agility while helping customers improve how they design, make, and deliver products. This cloud network empowers customers to move manufacturing workloads to regions and into markets that make the most business sense and enable easier product personalization.
Over the past year, Jabil has increased its 3D printing capacity steadily with more than 100 3D printers now in operation at facilities in the U.S., China, Hungary, Mexico, Singapore, and Spain. A variety of 3D printing machines have been installed for high-speed sintering, fused filament fabrication, polymer and metal laser sintering, and other processes to address emerging customer needs in the footwear, industrial machines, transportation, aerospace, and healthcare industries. Jabil's distributed manufacturing strategy is anchored by this growing ecosystem of 3D printers, which includes a dozen production-ready HP Jet Fusion 4200 3D printers, following the recent installation of six HP Jet Fusion 4210 printers at Jabil's Singapore facility.
Jabil currently unites product designers in Silicon Valley with Singapore-based manufacturing teams to accelerate the distributed manufacturing of products developed using HP Multi Jet Fusion technology, including parts for HP's 3D printers. More than 140 parts for HP's Jet Fusion 300/500 printers are being produced by Jabil using its Multi Jet Fusion technology and the Jabil Additive Manufacturing Network.
Jabil has enhanced its end-to-end process control capabilities while applying Design for Additive Manufacturing methods to deliver steady increases in part/assembly consolidation, manufacturability, reliability, and quality of 3D-printed parts. The speed and scope with which Jabil can manage the complexity of small manufacturing lot sizes empowers customers to achieve significant economies of scale and accelerated time-to-market. With its Additive Manufacturing Network, Jabil now can integrate digital additive production processes into diverse manufacturing applications to produce functional parts at a fraction of the cost and time required by traditional manufacturing.
Built from the ground up as an end-to-end framework for additive manufacturing, Jabil's network provides full traceability of manufacturing to address the complexity of scaling 3D printing across a distributed network. Moreover, the platform integrates seamlessly with Jabil’s Intelligent Digital Supply Chain (IDSC) to align materials, printers, and customer orders with supply chain demands.
At its Singapore facility, Jabil leveraged its engineering and manufacturing experience to ensure HP Jet Fusion process compliance in distributed ISO9001 facilities. The use of Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) tools, as well as process control documentation, enables the company to scale its use of additive manufacturing technologies rapidly. This ability to integrate end-to-end digital threads will speed adoption of distributed manufacturing while improving management of entire product lifecycles, from ideation to end-of-life.
For more information, please visit www.jabil.com.