New York, NY, June 22, 2007 - (Modern Plastics) - With a first-hand view of the rapid-manufacturing’s industry rise from additive processes for prototypes to low-volume creation of production parts, Ron Hollis, founder, president, and CEO of Quickparts, is predicting the next new wave in rapid—low-volume layered manufacturing—in a new book he just authored. Quickparts launched in 1999 with an online platform that features “instant quotes” where processors send in a CAD file with a few parameters and instantaneously generate a price quote. Hollis, who began his career as a design engineer at Boeing and felt first hand the frustration of sourcing parts, says he founded Quickparts on the premise that “for an engineer, it’s very, very difficult to get custom parts.”
Writing the book, ‘Better Be Running! Tools to Drive Design Success’, with executives versus engineers in mind, Hollis says his goal was to lay out the potential of new additive technologies in a manner that wasn’t “too geeky.” Hollis feels over the course of the next five years, what he terms a “paradigm shift” in manufacturing is coming, where advances in additive manufacturing, specifically in materials, could allow a new method of design. Specifically, Hollis sees a shifting away from design for manufacturability and assembly, where multiple components are added just to ease downstream processes, to simpler, holistic part concepts.
Hollis says the company’s 50%/yr growth earned it a spot on Inc. 500’s list of fast-growth firms. The company has 8000-plus customers, and last year, it took orders for 50,000 custom parts, with individual lot sizes putting the aggregate number of components into the millions. The company has a staff of 75, with many of them engineers, but no manufacturing machinery, outsourcing the jobs through a vendor base and acting as project managers.
Quickparts Services at-a-glance
Quickparts provides custom manufacturing services for engineers and designers looking to create plastic and metal parts from 3D CAD (computer-aided design) models. With its proprietary QuickQuote® geometric analysis software, Quickparts is able to provide product designers with an 'instant online quote' for the manufacturing of their custom parts from prototype to production.
Services include: Rapid Prototypes (SLA, SLS, FDM, PolyJet), Cast Urethanes, QuickTurn Injection Mold Tooling and Parts, Sheet Metal Parts, and CNC Machined Parts.
For more information, visit www.quickparts.com or call 877.521.8683.