How Invisalign became the world’s biggest user of 3d printers

From the article:

Align is embarking on its biggest manufacturing overhaul since it was founded by two Stanford Graduate School of Business classmates 29 years ago. The company is preparing to begin directly 3D printing the aligners at the core of its business, ditching what Hogan describes as a longer, more wasteful process that involves making molds. A successful transition could lower costs and make treatment more affordable in the long run, bringing Invisalign to more customers and boosting Align’s profits.

It also, according to Hogan, would entrench Align as the world’s biggest user of 3D printers. Hogan isn’t a founder or a scientist, though he has raised honeybees for over 25 years. He also doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, despite having run three multibillion-dollar international companies. But he’s a manufacturing veteran who knows about plastics and 3D printing, especially after over a decade at Align.

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Joe Hogan: We were the first ones to what I call mass customization, to be able to 3D print a million different aligners a day. It took us years to figure out how to do that. When these guys started, if they did five cases a day, they were excited. We had to take 3D printing equipment and modify it massively, because most 3D printing was a prototype business at that point in time.

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One of our biggest costs is just shipping. We're probably one of the largest small volume shippers in the world, and it's getting to a point as we've reduced our internal costs that a lot of what we do is transportation costs. If you look at our margins, you'd say they’re margins of a good company. It does well, but not extravagant margins.

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Going back to 3D printing, you've said you’re trying to directly print the aligners. But it sounds like you still need to have a breakthrough in terms of a material that'll go into these machines and be able to do that.

We feel we have that material. We do. That's why we bought Cubicure in Austria. It bothered me to death that we couldn't 3D print an aligner. We tried to work with chemical companies, everyone, to make this, and we couldn't find anyone that could do this. We hired our own polymer chemist, and then over time, we figured out how to make a resin that would have the properties of our current material that we vacuum form but be able to 3D print.

Once we had that material science done, we knew it was going to have to be high viscosity. Watery resins cannot deliver the combination of complex material properties and performance characteristics required for our applications. And that's why we bought Cubicure, because they have machines that know how to process high viscosity, performance resins. We have a resin we want, and that resin is as good or better than SmartTrack [Align’s current material]. And then we have a process to make aligners. Remember, we have to make a million of these a day. That kind of scale is monstrous, and we have a brand-new process. That's what we're going through now.

But what is the scaling challenge here? Is it just making enough of the machines? Is it getting quality control?

First of all, how do you print these things to limit the amount of resin that's used on them? Do you print them vertically? Do you print them horizontally? Do you print them sideways? Where do you put the runners, where the material actually goes into? Do you put it on the outside? Do you put it on the inside? Do you put it on the label side? Do you cut it with lasers?

When we vacuum formed, all you had to do was laser the gingival area, and you were done. In this case, it's a completely different story. It's a really dynamic and incredible engineering problem. We certainly have to be efficient enough to make sure that when we go into the marketplace, that it's a profitable equation. At scale, we should get to a point where the resin is less expensive, and that will help. But that takes years.