What started with funding from Kickstarter as a high-end, hobbyist, prosumer product company making robot parts in the founder’s garage has evolved into an internationally known leader in digital manufacturing technology. Now occupying 18,000 square feet in its Rapid City facility and with another office in Dallas, B9Creations, now manufactures precision 3D printers for a variety of industries, and still makes parts for some existing customers in work overflow situations. The company, which is named after a robot on the 1960s television series “Lost in Space”, also creates its own proprietary software to meet the specific needs of its clients.
After its beginnings in creating those 3D-printed robot parts, the company found a niche in the jewelry industry by providing the equipment for printing custom items to be used in lost-wax casting. While jewelry is still a major part of B9Creations’ customer base, aerospace, dental, and medical device applications have become dominant. The trend toward miniaturization of components in the medical field and toward efficiency in the aerospace industry have helped open the doors further to the benefits of additive manufacturing. While a lot has changed since those early days, CEO Shon Anderson says, “The core values of the organization, in terms of developing powerful technology that’s accessible, and delivering a great customer experience, have not changed.”
Perfecting the Technique
Anderson says the founder’s original vision was to create a product that provided a surface finish and dimensional accuracy that was better than what was on the market when the business started. Anderson continues, “Even today, that’s where we put our R&D focus. People talk about using additive manufacturing at scale for end-use production and if you want to be able to do that, we have to be able to outperform injection molding or milling, because those are the dominant forms of plastic part production today.”
B9Creations’ experience and expertise give them an advantage over the competition in terms of being able to provide the machines and software capable of producing the accuracy necessary for large-scale production use. “Most companies aren’t capable of doing that and that intellectual property and knowledge of how to do that and the tools that enable it, is what our men and women wake up and work on every day,” the CEO says. With many newcomers entering and exiting the field of 3D manufacturing in recent years, B9Creations is one of the “old guard”, having been around for twelve years.
Global Diversity for Success
Their reputation is such that the printers and software that B9Creations makes are sold in more than sixty countries around the world, with the company deriving about half of its business from outside the United States. A downside to that can be that geo-political events around the world can have detrimental effects on business, but by keeping their base as broad as possible, in both industry and location, that risk can be mitigated. In addition to standardized, off-the-shelf products, about half of the company’s revenue comes from customizing its hardware and software to meet the challenges that individual customers may have in their particular manufacturing process. Working with and understanding clients’ specific needs is crucial to their success. Most of B9Creations’ business is done directly with the customer, but they do have distribution partners who are experts in certain fields to better deal with the intricacies of some specialized industries.
Anderson joined the company about ten years ago as the Vice President of Sales and Marketing, but after about a year-and-a-half, the founder and then-CEO, Michael Joyce, told him, “This thing has gotten big enough that I’m not doing any of the fun stuff that I started this company to do. Why don’t you step into the CEO role? I’d rather be the CTO and get back in the lab and work on developing cool technology.” Anderson added, “It’s been a wild ride ever since.”
New processes, new customers
The company actively seeks out new customers, with some of its sales efforts going into stressing its capabilities and experience over competitors and the remainder persuading potential clients that additive manufacturing represents a better, more efficient way of making plastic parts as compared to the “old ways” of milling or molding. Additive manufacturing often results in fewer needed components to make an assembly. It also helps shorten supply chains and reduce how much inventory a potential customer must maintain. B9Creations also consults with and advises companies already using additive manufacturing processes, but who might be having difficulties achieving their quality or consistency goals.
Production workers at B9Creations come from varied backgrounds, but the most important attribute the company seeks out is extreme attention to detail, in order to maintain the precision and accuracy of their products. Design, assembly, calibration, and testing of the machines all take place at their Rapid City facility, as does all software development. While they have a generally stable workforce totaling about thirty, they do partner with educational institutions to help bring along the next generation of labor. “There’s a tremendous amount of career opportunity in this industry and we want to see that the next generation of people looking this way when they think about planning their future,” says Anderson.
Consistent accuracy in additive manufacturing over long-term production, as compared to milling and molding processes, is very important, and Anderson says, “Our industry needs to step up, we believe, if we want to make it into scale production and give customers the tools they need to conduct that same type of Q.A/Q.C. work, and B9 is leaning in hard to lead in that area.”
