ARRK Creates New 3D Printing Facility in Poland

This bit of news has to begin in 1948 in Osaka, Japan with the founding of a tooling company. Since that time, they have grown from a small office in Japan to a network of 21 companies around the world employing more than 5,000 people in their daily operations.

And they aren’t done growing yet.

Yesterday, ARRK Europe announced the addition of a new prototyping center in Poland in the city of Bydgoszca. This prototyping center will be an expansion of the already existing tooling facilities existing in the city and advances ARRK’s interests in expanding their presence in central Europe.

ARRK’s European RP Operations Director, Craig Vickers, explained the reasoning behind this growth:

“ARRK has ambitious plans for the future and closer ties with our European sister companies to deliver a comprehensive service to our customers will be key to our success. With this in mind, it was a simple decision to establish our new facility within one of ARRK’s tooling sites. Having a strong infrastructure in place and operating within ARRK systems and protocols it has has given us a head start and we plan on being operational before the end of the year. The center will provide additional resources to our existing offering, as well as being ideally located to succeed within the Polish and German markets.”

The expanded facility will be managed by Robert Dąbrowski and will be offering stereolithography and vacuum casting as their initial services. The plans for the facility are to then develop the capacity to also be a provider for SLS and Rapid CNC machining services. The hopes are that with the expansion of operations they will be better equipped to serve a number of their larger customers who have also been expanding into the central European market.

This is not the first facility of this type that ARRK has created in Europe, but follows their previous success in Gloucester, a location recognized as one of Great Britain’s premier rapid prototyping facilities. The expansion provides more than just a foot in the door of a new market, however. Instead, ARRK conceives of its locations as members of a network that work together to provide superior service to all locations.

Vickers described the role that will be played in that network by the newest addition:

“With our technical centers in Gloucester, Barcelona, and Alby-sur-Chéran in France, and support operations in the North East of England, Paris, Scandinavia and Italy we have established ourselves as key suppliers across Europe. Furthermore, by working together as one operation it has allowed us to deliver a number of very large projects, which no single site could have delivered alone. Therefore, with the need for extra capacity and to satisfy our strategy for growth, work has begun to create an RP facility in Bydgoszcz, Poland, where we already have a large toolmaking factory.”

What are your thoughts on ARRK’s expansion within the 3D printing space?  Discuss in the ARRK Poland forum thread on 3DPB.com.