Protolabs Expands Manufacturing Capabilities to Full-Service Production

Protolabs has expanded its capabilities with the introduction of full-service production to help serve companies at every stage in their product life cycles—from early prototyping and preproduction to large-scale manufacturing and end-of-life product support.

To align with the expansion, the  customer experience at Protolabs is evolving. In addition to immediate online access to instant quoting, customers now can connect directly with a team of production experts for program management on projects. That includes assistance with the quoting platform and file uploads to help navigate orders with complex bill of materials and strategic sourcing from Protolabs and its network partners. Operations specialists can assist with logistics fulfillment and applications engineers can work with customers to optimize CAD models.

“It’s a deeper partnership with our customers—product developers, engineers, buyers, procurement teams—to ensure full production support from start to finish,” says Protolabs’ president and CEO, Rob Bodor. “We are now truly a single manufacturing resource for companies around the world.”

Bodor and his leadership team have reorganized Protolabs’ business structure in parallel to further strengthen that partnership, bringing a more streamlined prototyping-to-production experience to its customers.

“Our regional organizations are now entirely focused on ensuring the best possible customer engagement and experience, and we have a global operations organization with the sole responsibility of seamlessly fulfilling customer part orders as a single unified offering,” Bodor explains.

Adds Strategic Growth Officer Luca Mazzei: “Rapid prototyping driven by automation and technology-enabled processes will always be at the core of who Protolabs is as a company. But as the market has changed, Protolabs is also changing to better meet the evolving needs of our customers. That is what our expansion into full-service production represents—a much more comprehensive way to serve our customers from start to finish.”

The idea of a “comprehensive offer” becomes tangible through the ongoing work to expand Protolabs’ four flagship service lines as well as the capabilities through the company’s manufacturing network. High-volume manufacturing with lower piece-part pricing is possible across services; high-requirement molding along with verification and validation processes are available to better serve quality assurance and certification needs of industries like medical device; and advanced polymers and metals in 3D printing will help sectors like aerospace innovate at new levels.

“The marriage of speed and automation to quality control, cost efficiency, and advanced manufacturing is a union unseen in the manufacturing industry until now,” says Mazzei. “Our customers have asked for these combined benefits for years, so we’re excited that we are able to bring this to them from prototyping to production—and every step along the way.”

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.