Secondary Services have been launched to provide additional support for On-Demand manufacturing requirements and additional value-add secondary operations, such as surface treatment and assembly, will be added later in the year.
Stephen Dyson, Protolabs’ special operations manager, says: “Our customers really value our rapid manufacturing services for low-volume parts and prototypes, but they now want the benefit of On-Demand manufacturing for production parts, which have higher expectations for sampling, measurement and process documentation.
“The marked increase from customers across all industries wanting to take advantage of the speed and flexibility of On-Demand manufacturing brings with it a desire to simplify the supply chain. We are offering Secondary Services to reduce the number of process steps that the customer has to manage, saving time and resources.”
First article inspection (FAI), Initial Sample Inspection Report (ISIR) and Product Part Approval Process (PPAP), which have originated in the aerospace and automotive industries, have been adopted by others as they provide a framework for establishing confidence in component suppliers and their production processes. It also provides the necessary control documentation.
As part of the launch of its Secondary Services, Protolabs will conduct a webinar on 28 February 2019. The webinar is for engineers and designers looking to further understand the process variations that occur when designing for injection moulding, and to learn how to prepare for these variations effectively.
