The Public Arena: EOS Government Relations Manager on Why the Company is All in on Reshoring 3D Printing

EOS has never not been at the forefront of additive manufacturing (AM). Among countless other feats, the German company, which has a strong presence in the US, has a global install base of almost 2,000 of its flagship EOS M290 metal printers. These days, being at the forefront of AM means taking a serious interest in reshoring, and, naturally, EOS is perfectly positioned to do just that. On the sidelines of RAPID + TCT 2024, the company’s government relations and key account manager, Jon Walker, took some time to detail for me what reshoring means to EOS, and what EOS can mean for reshoring.

One thing that I think sets Walker apart is his acute familiarity with the current trajectory of industrial policy in the US, which has seen a generational resurgence under the Biden administration. Walker pointed to the National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS), a pivotal document released by the US Department of Defense (DoD) in January 2024, as a key example of that resurgence:

“The NDIS marks the first time since World War Two that the US government has so explicitly demonstrated a focus on manufacturing specifically as a mission critical to national security,” argued Walker. “The document is floating through Congress right now as they try to figure out how to effectively implement the strategy’s core guidelines. The most important question the NDIS is trying to answer, more or less, is what does the US government have to do to ensure that the nation maintains and builds upon its strengths in manufacturing?

“My hope would be that this leads to more grant opportunities specifically for AM, or even $0-loan programs, but anything that makes it easier for manufacturers using 3D printers to become suppliers for the Air Force, for instance. In general, I think the barriers to adoption need to be lowered for contract manufacturers who are otherwise interested in onboarding 3D printing technologies.”

Admiral Scott Pappano, President of Phillips Corporation Alan Phillips, Secretary of the Navy, Carlos Del Toro, Sr. Vice President Global Additive John Harrison. Image courtesy of Phillips Corporation

That would clearly benefit both 3D printing OEMs and US contract manufacturers. For the US as a whole, the key to making this good policy is targeting the fiscal stimulus to make American supply chains as agile as possible:

“We need more companies online,” said Walker, “and they simultaneously need both increased capacity and greater flexibility. Most of what we’re talking about ties into issues related to metal parts. A real-world example of the sort of problem that I think needs attention: we had an opportunity where we brought maybe the world’s largest tire manufacturer to some service provider customers of ours to work on an airless tire application.

“The service providers all told us they were so booked up on work — nice, familiar, high-margin business — and they couldn’t justify stopping their general business, cleaning out their machines, and running the tire material through just to test this new application. That’s understandable, but it also could’ve led to a huge production opportunity.

“To me, this highlights that there simply needs to be more companies in the US able to leverage the flexibility of 3D printing to change materials over quickly, and to respond to new, possibly transformative ideas. I’d like to see 50-year-old, family-run machine shops get an EOS M290 to be able to add value to their business without having to risk too much on their initial investment. These are still free market principles. There should just be tools in place that can help those companies compete in the global free market.”

Another specific role for the government is in accelerating automation:

“Only something like one to five percent of metal AM customers are ready for automation,” explained Walker. “But should we sit back and wait until 50 percent of them are ready before we start to take action? The problem there is that, so far, there’s still probably not a business case for us to do it. That, then, would be a great example of a worthwhile project for the government to support: get automation in the AM industry going at a larger scale.

“Maybe some of the service providers aren’t sure on the ROI, so that’s where things like grant money or specific initiatives to accelerate adoption come in handy. Government organizations already excel at those sorts of objectives when it comes to qualifying parts.

“America Makes and the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), for instance, are running something called Delta Qual, which reduces the cost of qualifying parts, thereby reducing barriers to entry. So, in the future, if the Air Force wants to replace a casted or forged part with a part made with AM, it’s going to be more cost-efficient for manufacturing enterprises to do so. That will make it easier for industrial metal powder bed customers to do Air Force work. I think that’s a very instructive example of the government being proactive with the money it spends, on a specific barrier to adoption, that is making it easier to 3D print parts in the US in the long run.”

Finally, in broadest terms, Walker thinks history provides a good blueprint for the kinds of progress that only a government-led project can initiate:

“The fact people are talking about these issues at all is indispensable — a ‘the first step is admitting you have a problem’ scenario. But one thing I always come back to is this can’t take ten years. The timeline has to be more in the order of five years, or even two years.

“We’ve all heard the story of Kennedy saying, ‘We’re going to the moon’, and the government figured out what the window for that would be, and they put a man on the moon. The sort of moonshot that we need right now is bringing metal manufacturing back to the US. So, we need the same sort of hyperambitious, impossible-sounding goal. Something tangible: along the lines of, ‘We need to grow metal parts manufacturing by 25 percent in two years.’

“To put this sort of thing in context, I always think about how I interviewed at EOS the day after my son was born. I got on an airplane, flew to Detroit, in 2016. My son is eight years old now. He rides a bike. He plays travel hockey. He can code in Minecraft. I’ve seen how much a human being can grow in eight years.

“We have thousands of people working collectively as an industry, so why can’t we make bigger machines? Why can’t we make machines that are faster, and that incorporate new laser technology? So, it’s not just about spending money wisely, but spending time wisely, as well.”

Walker is certainly onto something, there. If there’s one thing that can push a project far ahead of where anyone thought possible, it’s an organizing principle.

Organizing principles aren’t something that are the exclusive purview of the public sector, but historically, governments have been the most effective actors at executing on strategies surrounding those kinds of big ideas. It will take some hashing out, to determine the best way to make that happen in the economy as it exists in the 21st century. But like Walker said — at least people are starting to talk about the problem.

Unless otherwise noted, images courtesy of EOS