1. 44
The future of manufacturing, as Scott
Borduin tells it, will be driven by the desire
to achieve big things—not incrementally
small improvements to established meth-
ods, but entirely new ways of providing
value that separate the providers from the
rest of the pack. Borduin is Autodesk’s
group chief technology officer for design,
lifecycle, and simulation products, a role
that has him negotiating some of the
fastest, most disruptive currents of tech-
nology innovation seen in decades. In his
keynote presentation at the TechConnect
World Innovation Conference and Expo
in Washington, D.C., earlier this summer,
Borduin left no doubt about the origins
of his prediction.
“Right now is the most interesting
time that I’ve ever been through,” he told
a packed conference room of attendees.
“The most exciting, dynamic, fast chang-
ing time I’ve ever seen in industry.”
When Borduin visits people in indus-
try today, he said, their conversations are
very different from what they were just a
decade ago. Then, if he asked what was
important to them, he was likely to hear
about an incremental improvement—
making the next round of their product “a
little bit better, getting it to market a little
bit faster, at a little bit lower cost, with a
little bit better quality.”
“Now, what people want to talk about
is innovation,” he said. “Everywhere I go,
I run into people whose titles are ‘VP of
Innovation, VP of Advanced Strategy.’
Everybody’s trying to figure out ‘How do
I do step function changes in my com-
pany’s value, in my company’s brand, in
what I deliver to customers? How do I
do disruptive kinds of innovation?’ And
if I can’t innovate a brand new kind of
product, well then, at least, if I’ve got
an existing category, I’m going to com-
pletely re-innovate the way I make that
thing, whether it’s the Boeing Dreamliner
that’s 20 percent lighter than you could
make it any other way because they went
COVER STORY
The Collaboration Imperative:
Why It’s Critical to Your Next Project
By Mark Shortt
radical on composites, or other kinds of
techniques. Everybody’s trying to figure
out how to innovate, and there’s a whole
bunch of trends that are opening up the
opportunities, and actually the impera-
tives, to innovate around these things.”
One of the more interesting trends,
Borduin said, is that design and engineer-
ing are no longer a function that’s limited
to siloed departments and people with
degrees.
“All of a sudden, everybody thinks that
they can be a designer or engineer, or
participate in that process,” Borduin said.
“Now, the people who are out there de-
signing new products want the customers
involved, they want suppliers involved. In
some cases, they are crowdsourcing their
designs and saying, ‘We’re just going to
open up a big contest, and have the best
ideas come from all over the world, and
then reward those people who win.’ And
so, we’re seeing now, partly driven by the
advances in cloud computing and mobile
technology, the ability of people all over
the world to participate early in a design
process. That’s a big trend.”
Seeing the benefits of open source,
collaborative design is changing the
way companies think about intellectual
property. Long a staple of the software
industry, the open source movement is
catching on in hardware, too, whether
it’s circuit boards, 3D printing machines,
or automobiles. And probably the most
radical example, Borduin said, is Tesla’s
decision to open-source its electric car
technology.
“Why on earth would they do that? Be-
cause they said, ‘Look, what we’re trying
to do is drive the whole industry forward,
because we believe if we drive that whole
electric vehicle industry forward, we’ll
benefit because we have some major
advantages in battery technology. So we
don’t care if somebody else copies our
designs; in fact, we want them to.’
“So people are thinking differently
now about what you do, where you’re
getting your intellectual property from,
Team members collaborating on a design
project using cloud-based Autodesk software.
Photo courtesy of Autodesk, Inc.

3. 46 DESIGN-2-PART magazine • August 2015
and incorporating those things, and col-
laborating more instead of just treating
everything as a siloed, protected piece of
intellectual property.”
Borduin said that GE is one of the
companies that’s pushing the hardest
right now in the area of open source, col-
laborative design.
“You’ve got GE sponsoring, by the
dozen, crowdsourced designs, putting
out design challenges and saying, ‘Here’s
a challenge we don’t know how to solve.
We’re going to put it out there publicly,
and people worldwide are going to col-
laborate and come back with the best
answer.’” In his presentation, Borden
pointed to a GE jet engine bracket as an
example of a design where someone who
was not a GE employee—M Arie Kurni-
awan, from Indonesia—trumped all of the
GE engineers in their ability to design a
better, more structurally sound bracket.
Collaborative, open source design and
3D printing technology have made it pos-
sible to innovate much more quickly, and
Borduin believes that moving such design
and production capabilities out “much,
much closer to the end consumer” could
improve the nation’s abilities in the de-
fense arena. Noting that the U.S. military
has had a “great history of innovating out
in the field,” he wondered aloud what it
would mean to equip service personnel
with these capabilities.
“Let’s build these kinds of forward op-
erating, mobile, rapid production things,
let’s put the skills out there, let’s let them
collaborate with people around the world,
with real time collaboration, and let’s let
them build what they need to do to get
their jobs done,” he said.
Ultimately, Borduin said, all of these
trends create not just opportunity, but
also the imperative to change, “because
if you don’t change, somebody else will.”
And it’s not all just about the technology,
he said, but about people.
“If you don’t change how you think
and how you operate, who you connect
with, how you share IP, how you coordi-
nate things, none of this will really matter.”
He ended by encouraging attendees to
“think about how you connect with people
in disciplines that aren’t even closely
related to you. If you’re a manager, think
about how you create not just the opportu-
nity, but the imperative for your people to
think differently and do different things.”
A Driver of Innovation
A striking example of how collabora-
tion can facilitate design innovation is
Divergent Microfactories’ prototype su-
percar, Blade, which company CEO Kevin
Czinger introduced at the O’Reilly Solid
Conference 2015 in San Francisco in June.
Blade, which features a 700-horsepower,
bi-fuel engine that uses either compressed
natural gas or gasoline, reportedly goes
from 0 to 60 in two seconds and weighs
about 1400 pounds. The prototype repre-
sents a new approach to auto manufactur-
ing that radically reduces the amount of
The first place prize-winning jet engine
bracket in GE’s 3D Printing Design Quest,
a crowdsourced design competition, was
designed by M Arie Kurniawan, of Salatiga,
Indonesia. (Photo: GE)

4. 47August 2013 • www.d2pmagazine.com
material, energy, and capital needed to
build a car.
In a presentation at the Solid Con-
ference, Czinger said that Blade’s key
enabling technology is a “node,” a 3D
printed aluminum alloy connector that
joins aerospace-grade carbon fiber tubing
into standardized building objects, which
enable a small team to design and build
car chassis ranging from two-seat sports
cars to pickup trucks. Whereas traditional
chassis can weigh over a thousand (1,000)
pounds, Blade’s chassis weighs about 102
pounds—61 pounds of aluminum nodes,
and 41 pounds of carbon fiber, Czinger
said. The result of using 3D printed alu-
minum alloy to connect the larger, struc-
tural fiber of the chassis is that the chassis
“requires dramatically less material and
energy to produce,” he added.
In a Q&A following his presentation,
Czinger talked about the role of collabora-
tion in the development of the prototype
supercar. It all began, he said, with his
initial idea of combining the strength of
3D metal printing (“complexity is free,”
he said) with aerospace-grade carbon
fiber material for the chassis tubing. The
first order of business was to design and
test to make sure this was a real automo-
tive application—not just another artisan
application, he said—that was replicable
and scalable.
“First, the engineering team came to-
gether and we did real physical testing and
simulation, like you do in an automotive
context, and then, from there, we brought
in our designer,” Czinger told D2P. “Using
the chassis structure in that way means
that the body can be sculpted in any way
you want because all of the structure is
in the chassis itself, not in the body. So,
literally, that body could have been made
out of Spandex. At that point, we were one
team. We were always all together, talking,
Divergent Microfactories has developed Blade,
a lightweight prototype supercar that uses 3D
printed aluminum joints to connect pieces of
carbon fiber tubing to make up the chassis.
(Photo: Business Wire)
solving problems, and collaborating as a
small team.”
Czinger said that the model for his
team’s collaboration was the late Clarence
“Kelly” Johnson, the former Lockheed en-
gineer and team leader of the Lockheed
Martin Skunk Works (Advanced Develop-
ment Programs) known for his contribu-

5. 48 DESIGN-2-PART magazine • August 2015
tions to the designs of the Lockheed U-2
and SR-71 Blackbird.
“He had a set of principles of how,
with a team of 20 to 30 people, you could
basically design the most complex plane
in the world,” Czinger said. “What they
did is, during the Cold War, I think, in
literally a month’s period of time, a team
of about 20 people designed the U-2 and,
within a year, put it into production. And
he created a set of principles that basically
said, ‘If you have people who are willing
to collaborate, and be cross functional,
and learn from one another, then that’s
a know-how multiplier.’ You’re basically
adding know-how so that in the end, the
result is much greater than individual
know-how that people have from hiving
off into different function groups.’”
Czinger said that Divergent Microfac-
tories’ goal is to use the know-how learned
from the prototype car to make the first
scalable microfactory platform, standard-
ize it as a manufacturing platform, and
then transfer that know-how by turning
over and licensing it to other teams, which
could be anywhere in the world.
“Once that happens, they’re like, ‘we
not only have the node, but each of those
nodes is a part of a node in a network,
generating information,’” Czinger said.
“All that innovation gets shared, which
is why we’re calling it ‘Divergent.’ So you
diverge in your innovation, you share,
new ideas emerge, get assimilated into
the system, and then you go through the
process again at a much higher rate of
innovation.”
Collaborating for Part Quality
and Cost Reduction
Collaboration between product manu-
facturers and their suppliers isn’t exactly
a new phenomenon. But as they see the
advantages that can be gained through
collaborative partnerships, product
manufacturers are increasingly looking to
engage with companies that can function
more as active, collaborative “partners”
in their customers’ success, as opposed
to just “suppliers” of parts or services.
Companies with strong problem-solving
skills, including the ability to listen care-
fully, communicate effectively, and truly
understand customer needs and require-
ments, are in particularly high demand.
Spokane Industries, headquartered
in Spokane Valley, Washington, manu-
factures sand and investment castings for
industries that include oil tool, mining,
construction, military, marine, medical
equipment, food processing, and pump
and valve. The company’s capabilities in
both sand and investment casting allow
Spokane to satisfy customer needs ranging
from very small, finely-detailed invest-
ment cast parts to large sand castings up
to 5500 pounds. When using investment
casting, Spokane is able to produce parts
ranging in weight from just ounces up to
100 pounds.
“A lot of the parts that we collaborate
with customers on are pretty complex
and are being used in mission critical
applications, either on drill rigs or in
mining applications, or in a frame for a
heavy truck,” said Terry Decker, sales and
marketing manager for Spokane Indus-
tries, in a phone interview. “What we do a
really good job of is identifying problems
early on and then doing the hard work
to come back and say, ‘You know what?
This is the way we all thought we were
going, but what we’ve learned, as we’ve
gotten more into it, is that if we go in this
direction, it’s going to be a better deal,’
and then addressing any issues that come
up with that. If it takes us going around

7. 50 DESIGN-2-PART magazine • August 2015
A final machined part produced by Spokane
Industries, a manufacturer of sand and
investment castings. Photo courtesy of
Spokane Industries.
again to do a new solidification model or
move some things around, we’re always
willing to do that and really work with the
customer to make it right.”
Spokane’s technical team works closely
with customers from the time of receiving
a request for quote, through shipping of
the final product. The team collaborates
with customers during the quote process
to fully understand their requirements,
the application, and the final machined
form, Decker said in an emailed response.
After reviewing the drawings and require-
ments, Spokane will recommend changes
that preserve the functionality of the part
while improving castability and reducing
final cost. The team can also help identify
parts that are good candidates for con-
version to castings, and collaborate with
customers to ensure a successful conver-
sion, she said.
Decker said that if begun sufficiently
early, a collaborative relationship with
Spokane Industries can bring customers
significant gains in part quality, as well as
some major cost reductions resulting from
fewer failures and repair costs in the field.
“Some of our really great examples
of collaboration over the past two years
are where customers can really define
well what their ‘problem space’ is, what
their requirements are, and what they
need,” she told D2P in an interview. “If
they give us a little more leeway to work
on the ‘how’ to make that happen, we
can come up with some really creative
solutions that, in the end, are significant
cost savers and can provide better quality
and better longevity out in the field. The
way it works best is, if we can get involved
early, and if we can have some leeway to be
creative in how to best apply our processes
to that problem, I think you get some re-
ally great results.”
Besides being involved early, a sup-
plier’s ability to establish a successful
collaborative relationship with a customer
hinges on a couple of other essential
requirements: its technical knowledge
and expertise regarding the application,
and its ability to understand what the
customer needs.
“To be successful with it, you certainly
have to bring your ‘A’ game and have the
right talent and the right people from our
side that can really provide that consult-
ing,” Decker said. “We have to understand
our side of it really well, and we also can
do our best when we have a fairly good
understanding of what the customer
needs—what’s the application that it’s
going into? Is there machining and as-
sembly that’s happening downstream? If
we know about it, we can help design to
minimize machining, or to make things
simpler and integrate more parts together.
So it all starts with being really great at
what you know, being really good at being
able to understand the customer applica-
tion and the downstream processes, and
then establishing a good, healthy working
relationship.”

9. 52 DESIGN-2-PART magazine • August 2015
Decker was asked if the need for supplier collaboration has
always been great, or, alternatively, has it become more important
to manufacturers in recent years?
“My belief is that it’s always been really important for casting
suppliers to work really collaboratively with their customers,”
Decker told D2P. “We know our process; they know what they need
in terms of design and requirements. And to get a part that you
can consistently cast, with good quality and at a reasonable price,
takes both sides of that equation working really well. But I also
would say I think it’s become more important in recent years.”
Decker believes the greater need for collaboration these days
is partly a reflection of changes in workforce demographics. As
people who’ve worked with castings for many years retire, they’re
often being replaced by workers who have less experience with
castings and more experience with designing and developing
parts using different kinds of techniques. To bridge that knowl-
edge gap, it’s become more important for casting suppliers to
reach out more and provide more consulting and more collabo-
ration earlier on, she said.
“We can get requests for quotes for products that really just
aren’t castable the way they’re designed, or are really prohibi-
tively expensive to cast that way,” she said. “But once you get to a
point where that drawing’s been stamped off and approved, it’s
really hard to go back and make changes. So I think, over time,
it’s becoming more important to collaborate, and to collaborate
early on.”
Engineering Lead Time Reductions
For Tri-Mack Plastics Manufacturing Corporation, one of the
keys to meeting its clients’ needs for high-performing, cost-effective
parts and shorter lead times is its collaborative approach to working
with customers.The Bristol, Rhode Island-based manufacturer of high-
performance engineered components specializes in high temperature
thermoplastics and thermoplastic composites for the aerospace, indus-
trial, medical, and other demanding markets (see page 66).
The company is open to working with customers who come
to them at any stage of a project, said Tri-Mack President, Will
Kain, in an interview with D2P. And because collaboration with
customers is about more than manufacturing components, it’s
therefore essential that customers engage them early in order to
maximize opportunities for cost and lead time reduction.
“New customers come to us at all different stages of projects,”
Kain said. “The ones that come to Tri-Mack a little late may al-
ready have a tool design figured out, they may be thinking that
they’re saving time, and they’ll say, ‘All right, here’s our design.
Can you guys just make us a tool? And then we’re going to take
that part and go out and machine it somewhere.’ They’ve missed
the advantage of working with Tri-Mack because they’ve come in
late and we’re not able to steer them in things like cost-effective
ways of molding near net and machining.”
As an example, Kain said, the customer might believe that
they need to use a “super Cadillac,” complex tool to mold every
feature to finish. But in fact, for the volumes they have, it might
have been more efficient for them to mold some features to finish
and some features with secondary machining, and greatly reduce
the tool complexity.
“They’ve missed an opportunity; they’re already down a path,
and they’ve committed to that. We’ll work with them at any stage
of it, but the real successful ones are the ones that come to us
and say, ‘Hey, have you guys made something kind of like this,

11. 54 DESIGN-2-PART magazine • August 2015
and what would be your approach?’ When we have that level of
cooperation early on, we feel very confident that we’re going to
be successful.”
Engineering is a big part of this ability to collaborate. “It’s the
biggest piece, for sure,” said Kain. “It takes an attitude throughout
the corporation, but also engineering’s ability to foresee where
there’s a need and then go fill it.”
Collaborating with customers from the outset of a project—in
the sense of sharing its engineering know-how in everything from
choosing the right material to offering recommendations on cost-
effective part design and a manufacturing process that suits the
design intent—has long been a staple of Tri-Mack’s repertoire.
But Kain believes the need for collaboration has become more
pronounced in recent years as engineers at product manufactur-
ing companies grapple with the issue of time scarcity, a problem
amplified by heightened pressures to reduce lead time.
“We have been providing that service for some of our closest
customers for a long time—as I recall, since the early 1990s,”
said Kain. “But it has definitely become more prevalent. We’re
not going to take full credit for it, but we have definitely turned
on our customers to that approach whenever possible because
other companies are beginning to realize that they can cut a huge
amount of lead time out of a project if they let us get in early and
help design for success. It’s definitely becoming a trend, at least
in our industry, and people are seeing the success of it.”
Kain credits flexibility and a willingness to adapt to the
customer’s culture as keys to Tri-Mack’s effectiveness as a collab-
orative partner. For many of its customers, especially longtime
customers, the Tri-Mack team already knows how much flexibility
they can expect, as well as how open their design teams are to
suggestions. “Once you have that figured out, you know the lim-
its of where you can help and where you can’t,” he said. “Some
customers would never trust a supplier to make design-related
calls, but once you know those limits, you can supply support.
We can adapt. We’re not so rigid in our structure as to say, ‘Okay,
our process is 1 through 19, and we’re going to do it exactly this
way. If you like it, great; if you don’t, we’re not going to work well
together.’ We’ve never taken that approach.”
Tri-Mack’s ability to be flexible and adaptive serves customers
well in today’s manufacturing environment, where redesigns are
often made on the fly, in the later stages of a project. It’s a trend
that Kain sees happening more now than in the past.
“With better CAD/CAM systems, you would think that ev-
erything would be perfectly modeled and there would be no
interferences, and everybody would know exactly what they’ve
got before they released the first drawing,” he said. “And in fact,
the timelines that they’re working to are so fierce that there may
be less definition now than there was 10 years ago, and it’s in that
rush to improve on the fly. There might be an improvement in
overall efficiency: Somebody comes up with a breakthrough, and
they’re going to want to ‘sneak’ it into the design. And that may
require 50 other parts to be redesigned at the last minute. We’re
actually going through that right now, and we’re able to provide
the flexibility to support this redesign process.”
Solving Problems
and Speeding Product Launches
After making substantial investments in recent years to im-
prove its service offerings, Bestronics, Inc., is in the midst of a
significant period of growth. As of June 30, revenues for the San

12. 55August 2013 • www.d2pmagazine.com
Jose, Calif.-based electronics manufacturing services company
were up “almost 70 percent” over the previous year, said Bestron-
ics CEO Nat Mani in a recent phone interview. The company
moved into new quarters in San Jose’s International Business
Park in 2013, tripling the size of its former facility, and is already
eyeing an expansion that would double the space at its current
facility, Mani told D2P.
Mani attributes Bestronics’ growth to its success in maintain-
ing long standing relationships with customers and providing
them with “highly flexible manufacturing solutions.”
“If you want to summarize our business model, once we get a
customer, we don’t ever, ever lose them,” he said. “We do what-
ever we can to keep them, and that’s been what distinguishes us.
The last few years, we’ve added a significant amount of technical
capabilities and collaborative partnership models, essentially
trying to figure out how to solve customers’ problems, and get-
ting more strategic with them. That’s how we can differentiate
ourselves within our competition.”
From mechanical design to testing and everything in between,
the capabilities required to bring a product to market today are
too diverse for one company to handle entirely in house. As a
result, Mani believes, the need for collaboration has become
more important in recent years.
“I think it’s become more important because it enables a
much faster launch of the product idea,” he said. “To the extent
that you can see what’s out there, what’s readily available, or what
somebody can put together, helps you dramatically speed your
product innovation cycles and launches.”
Bestronics doesn’t offer a “one size fits all collaborative ap-
proach” because each customer has different needs, Mani said.
Some customers, for example, may want help on the design side
of the product.
“They have an idea, and so they come to somebody like us,”
he explained. “We may not have those resources in house, but
we can network and bring the right kind of design resources,
whether they’re industrial design or whatever, to come up with
a solution for the customer that meets their requirements. In
some cases, we’ll work with distribution partners that have some
innovative approaches towards a very cost-optimized design solu-
tion. They also allow for component selection, which is critical
in this sort of thing.”
In addition to enabling a much faster product launch, col-
laboration allows for a “well-reasoned solution,” Mani said. If a
customer comes up with a design that appears not to be mechani-
cally viable, for example, the Bestronics team might suggest shock
and vibration and stress testing of the product under certain
conditions. If the product fails any of those tests, they would
then suggest design improvements. “Those are things that they
wouldn’t consider if they were doing this on their own, so that
sort of knowledge base is critical because it essentially ensures
that the product design is much more robust,” Mani said.
On the other hand, if a customer chooses a manufacturing
partner that lacks expertise, Mani said, they won’t be able to see
whether their milestones are going to be met, or if the product
that’s coming forward is going to meet their requirements. “The
fact that we’re able to do that is a tremendous value,” Mani said.
“So you rely on an industry knowledge base to not only speed your
product launches, but make sure your costs are in line with what
you need, and also for a more robust sort of solution.”
Building a successful collaborative partnership with a client

13. 56 DESIGN-2-PART magazine • August 2015
requires an open and practical conversation on both sides, Mani
said. “We all need to understand that we’re working together to
get this product into the market in a certain amount of time and
at certain cost parameters, so that collaborative approach—and
what the issues and challenges are—will be shared openly,” said
Mani. “We’re able to figure out, as a team, how we address those
[issues and challenges], and if there are some unrealistic targets
or unrealistic expectations, we all sit together and say, ‘This is what
we need to look at’ and assess that, and that is very important.”
Silicon Valley’s flourishing innovation ecosystem is tailor-made
for companies that are working to develop transformational
new products. Partners exist, Mani said, for “almost anything
and everything” that a company would need for its product to
be successful.
“A little known fact about San Jose is that it has, I think, from
the data I saw from the city, about six times more electronic
manufacturing head count than any other region in the U.S.,”
said Mani. As a result, the area is a magnet for “virtually every type
of supply chain partner,” including design firms, testing houses,
and plasma coating service providers.
“When you’re launching a product, you have those available,
literally, in your Rolodex, and you can actually get these things
done very quickly,” he said. “In fact, that’s one of the reasons
why we’re attractive to customers that are located outside of
Silicon Valley, because they can use us to help them tap into the
local resources. Silicon Valley has that knowledge base and the
resources. It is something that’s just hard to duplicate because
the momentum has been built over 40, 50 years of technology
innovation that’s happened in this area.”
Bestronics recently hosted the first annual Silicon Valley Agile
Manufacturing Economic Strategy meeting, which is focused on
growing and supporting agile manufacturing in Silicon Valley.
Mani explained why agile manufacturing has become so impor-
tant. Expectations regarding product lifecycles today, he said, are
driven by a standard that’s been set, for example, by someone
who writes an app that quickly solves a bunch of problems. Now,
when someone designs a hardware product, there’s a similar
pressure to get a solution as fast as possible. The goal is to dem-
onstrate the proof of concept and get it into a customer’s hands
as quickly as possible.
“That means that the whole supply chain, the ecosystem,
everything has to respond literally around the clock in order
to meet that,” he said. “In the old days, you could afford, if you
were a larger company, a three-year or five-year design cycle,
sometimes, to come up with a large product platform. But that
is simply not possible today, if you were that slow. So you need to
figure out how quickly to put these things together, and this is
where this whole [necessity of] being agile, nimble, lean, or on
demand becomes vitally important.”
Mani realizes that listening carefully to customers is a vital
key to building successful collaborative relationships with them.
“That’s where I think we’re successful because we really take a
lot of time and effort to really understand what the requirements
are. What we’ve learned, having been in this business a long
time, is to be really humble, listen carefully, and keep talking to
customers and understanding what their changing requirements
are. We understand that a solution that’s prescribed today may
not be relevant ten years from now, or five years from now, so
we need to constantly adapt and tailor that, not only within the
same timeframe, but also to each customer’s unique situation.”