Digital Transformations: 5 Lessons 3-D Printing Can Learn From Zoom

As the world continues to digitize at an ever-quickening rate, different sectors of advanced technology have many lessons to impart to one another. 3-D printing (additive manufacturing) is currently learning many lessons from the advanced manufacturing response to COVID-19 — it can also take some important learning from digital conferencing platform Zoom.

Video conferences are becoming a daily mainstay in this current pandemic-stricken world. Business must continue, and with face-to-face interaction at a minimum, screen-to-screen connections are keeping operations afloat and ensuring regular contact with customers, clients, and suppliers.

Stefan Zschiegner, Former Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Velo3D and Principal at CenterFocus, is currently Vice President Of Product Management at Itron. He has dedicated his career path as a senior technology business executive to accelerating digital transformation. 

We caught up — over a Zoom meeting — initially to discuss how Zoom’s IPO last year could offer important lessons to 3-D printing, and now in 2020 we see that those lessons are more relevant than ever as both digital conferencing and additive manufacturing are becoming ever more prominent in these unusual and vastly dynamic times.

Before we began our acquaintance during Zschiegner’s time at metal additive manufacturing company Velo3D, he worked in unified communications. Zschiegner describes it as “a very crowded space, and all about the digital transformation of the workplace. This leads to a larger industry trend, where basically all companies are thinking about ‘how do I use all these digital solutions to make my workplace more productive?’”

Along with Zoom are standouts like WebEx, GoToMeeting, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, and others — all of which are of course gaining significant use this spring, sprinting upward from their already ascending trajectories. Digital transformation is becoming a tool not just of productivity, but of necessity.

And the same can be seen in the advanced manufacturing space, as digital manufacturing enables localized and on-demand production with 3-D printing and associated technologies.

Just as Zoom has become quite a standout in its space — and used increasingly regularly among 3-D printing industry participants — companies working in additive manufacturing can take a look at the course that the platform took on its rise toward prominence (and impressively high valuation). Zoom became a unicorn last year through its IPO, with a remarkable market cap for the young team. “The market cap is $18 billion on a small company that was founded in 2011,” Zschiegner noted last April, “and we need to look at how and why they did this; Zoom is a company in this highly competitive space, and figured out how to create a huge success.”

What examples has Zoom set that can translate to lessons for another digital transformation?

Select A Focused Beachhead

Focus is critical to success, especially in a space crowded with not only many voices, but many options. Office digital transformation is “huge, diverse, and distractive,” Zschiegner acknowledges — and in response, “Zoom focused on a video-first small conference ‘huddle room’ software solution. This, he adds, is a workplace trend responding directly to the rise of Millennials and Gen Z workers who are open to more forms of communication and are more likely to have grown up with digital options.

“What Zoom did was start to focus on one specific use case and make it perfect; they solved small problems, making video and voice messaging on the internet work,” Zschiegner says. The company invested in making one application work, and work well, enabling good experiences even with poor internet connections, and it saw success. The model enables free use, as users joining the call don’t have to pay, as well as smaller-scale usage available without a fee, getting — not more feet in the door, but more faces on the screen.

For 3-D printing, selecting a beachhead “doesn’t mean selecting an industry like aerospace or automotive,” Zschiegner clarifies, “it means being very specific on target applications and parts.”

He points as an example to the work Desktop Metal’s Studio System enables in replacing short-run molded parts. Desktop Metal reached unicorn status in 2017, two short years after its founding, clearly indicating that such a clear focus is a strong strategy to billion-dollar valuation.

Solve The Big Challenge

Lesson two is one of viability: solve the big challenge. For Zoom, that meant “making video, voice, and messaging work over the internet with a great user experience,” Zschiegner says. This was, technically speaking, a major challenge — and in Zoom’s case, the team “developed the underlying technology because it was mission-critical for their success,” Zschiegner adds. They laid out the need, saw that meeting it was make-or-break — and they made it.

In 3-D printing, where hype ran the show for too long a decade ago, “the underlying technology must work,” Zschiegner continues. That is, “the 3-D printer must deliver good parts of its beachhead application in a predictable way.” While there are many pressures on entrepreneurs to go broad early, companies must not be sidetracked by expanding to new applications before they have “nailed that beachhead.”

“Improvements to other technologies target the overcoming of cost, quality, or precision challenges of specific use cases that held alternative technologies back,” Zschiegner says. For metal 3-D printing, that can mean following the example of well-established powder bed fusion technologies that have already solved the big challenges in metal applications and expanding that to additional materials familiar to traditional metalworking. In recent years powder bed fusion technology adoption transitioned from prototyping to volume manufacturing based on improved control of critical parameters that ensure predictable and consistent results. For this, solutions such as real-time in-situ monitoring are on the rise to ensure build-by-build consistency and in-build problem-solving.

Relentlessly Focus On Customer Experience

Zoom sought to address customer experience in one major way: reaching the goal of “it just works.” While early on, Zschiegner notes, that ease-of-use and reliability was only consistently achievable “with fewer than ten attendees and with robust internet, the more detailed definition of use cases and the direct accountability of the customer service experience helped them to focus on improving continuously so that now even with 40% data loss, customers receive a good video experience.” When the business is directly reliant upon customer experience, such focus must, indeed, be relentless.

In 3-D printing, this translates to focus on the customer journey and “developing a whole product that customers want to use more,” Zschiegner says; “Often systems had been sold and installed, and then the success has been left to the customer to figure it out; in the past this has resulted in low utilization, customer dissatisfaction, and finally the slowdown of adoption.” Because additive manufacturing is still in the relatively early days of widespread adoption, each installation represents an opportunity for customer experience. Training, service, and on-call attention are key to ensuring those customers who have invested in their own on-site 3-D printing systems have access to the resources needed to actually use them to their greatest potential. This includes suppliers bringing parts to the customers, and especially engaging upstream engagements with the development teams to ensure system utilization. 

Among the many examples of attention to customer success in additive manufacturing are consulting with GE, EOS’ Additive Minds team, Stratasys’ software investments, and HP’s “organizational focus on customer success and market development for their new 3-D printing solutions,” Zschiegner points out.

Change The Customer Relationship

Zoom approached the move to a new customer relationship with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscription model, Zschiegner says, through starting with the “freemium approach.” Signing up with a free license is an intriguing approach that has seen great success. As of our conversation last April, Zschiegner noted that “over 55% of Zoom’s current large enterprise customers started with a free license.” That free start is proving more important than ever a year later, when Zoom is proving key to ongoing company operations in many cases. “The contract renewal rate is up, the contract terms are getting longer, and it’s all starting from a small community of users in a large company,” Zschiegner says.

The broader lesson here is that while, “yes, you can make more money over time selling services versus selling products…providing a service business model versus a product model changes the relationship with the customer,” Zschiegner continues on. “It is not just a way to create a new financial mechanism; it puts the technology supplier in control and makes him accountable for the customer’s success 24/7. There’s no one else to blame, and this creates focus on technology adoption eliminating any barriers across the entire customer journey.” In the 3-D printing industry, Zschiegner points to a company that has taken by far “the most comprehensive, focused approach in controlling the outcome through every step of the customer journey”: another unicorn, Carbon.

Carbon has created clear production applications and implemented a subscription model for their business, rather than simply selling their 3-D printers. Work with customers isn’t just “work with customers”; many of Carbon’s highest-profile applications come in the form of partners. Partnership creates a much deeper relationship, and the success of these relationships can be seen through their work with the likes of Riddell and Adidas. In these partnerships, Carbon didn’t just work on 3-D printing issues, but engaged with partner experts on product innovation creating new demand. And of course, these days Carbon is working closely with medical professionals to deliver viable solutions addressing COVID-19, including 3-D printed face shields and nasopharyngeal test swabs.

Create A “Viral Enthusiasm”

We’re obviously talking about the familiar, usual phrasing of things “going viral” here, in which fast spread refers to word getting out quickly and positively. In Zoom’s case, the fast-spreading enthusiasm is based again on user experience. “When a new user joins a video call as a participant, they experience the service and see how it works. Now they want to use it themselves and host their next meeting with Zoom because it works so well,” Zschiegner explains. “This networking effect created an acceleration for the platform.”

For 3-D printing, he says, this currently remains “the big question: who will enable this new route to market and create the ‘viral enthusiasm’? It could be one of the aforementioned technology providers, but it could also be someone like Fast Radius that creates the aggregated, new digital manufacturing experience that creates that enthusiasm.” Service providers offering 3-D printing access — Fast Radius, Protolabs, Stratasys Direct Manufacturing, 3D Hubs, Shapeways, The Technology House, and many others among them — create immediate access for potential new users of the technology, without their having to go through their own hefty initial investment in ownership. These companies innovate the customer experience and the business model in creative ways making 3-D printing more accessible for large-scale adoption. Enthusiasm builds with access, and the immediacy of service bureaus offers them a large step forward.

Applying The Lessons

For 3-D printing to raise its profile, applying the lessons of other successful businesses will be key. Constantly learning from both new responses and established success stories is more important now than ever before as digital manufacturing takes its place in the ongoing big picture of digital transformation.