Demonstrating Savings with New ROI Tools in Eiger
Return on Investment (ROI) is a critical measure to assess the performance of an investment relative to its costs. Additive manufacturing provides many ROI benefits, such as reduced labor and part costs, inventory reduction, downtime avoided, and reduced lead time.
Assessing ROI is valuable before and after making a purchasing decision:
Before making a decision to purchase a 3D printer, estimating the potential ROI helps justify the investment.
After purchasing a 3D printer, estimating the realized ROI provides your business with data to evaluate outcomes and to gain support for continued investment and expansion.
One of the key inputs to ROI is part spend – the cost to manufacture a part – which you can now estimate automatically in Eiger.
Return on Investment Dashboard
Leveraging data automatically collected by Eiger, the cost to manufacture parts on your Markforged printers can be tracked and compared to the cost of manufacturing the same parts using traditional methods. This data is presented in one of two new windows in the ROI dashboard: Part Spend and Cost Savings Per Year
Part Spend compares the cost of manufacturing parts using Markforged and traditional methods.
- Cost Savings Per Year is the sum of Part Spend savings on an annual basis.
Estimating the cost to print a single part in Eiger is easy - it is automatically calculated when a part is sliced. However, manually collecting, assembling and analyzing this data over multiple parts, devices, and timeframes is tedious and error prone. The new ROI Dashboard collects and analyzes data automatically without any user involvement. Simply go to Eiger and view the ROI Dashboard to see the costs.
How about the cost to manufacture a part using traditional methods? Estimating this value for even a single part can take a lot of effort and, as such, doesn’t happen for most parts. So, how does Eiger estimate the alternative manufacturing cost?
How does it work?
There are two values reported in the Part Spend window: With Markforged and Alternative Cost.
With Markforged
This is the cost to manufacture all parts that have been printed over a given period of time.
It includes parts printed on all cloud-connected printers (offline devices are not included) and from all users in your Eiger organization.
It is based on the per part cost calculated in Eiger, which is the material cost for the part.
It includes completed prints as well as canceled prints. Canceled prints are included in the part spend cost because the material is considered scrap as it is not reusable.
Alternative Cost
This is the cost to manufacture all of the parts that have been printed, but with traditional manufacturing methods like machining and casting.
The estimated cost is 10x the cost to manufacture the parts with Markforged. For this calculation, only completed (successful) prints are considered in the Markforged cost.
Where did the 10x factor come from? Data from over 400 customer parts was used to determine the median cost ratio between manufacturing with traditional methods (primarily machining) and manufacturing with Markforged. The median cost ratio from this analysis was 15x - meaning the median cost to traditionally manufacture a part is 15 times the material cost to print it. Since cost calculations are complex and are usually estimates themselves, a conservative factor of 10x was selected for the ROI Dashboard.
To summarize, the ROI Dashboard in Eiger has two key attributes that provide a first order estimate of how much money your business has saved with your investment in Markforged:
Fully automated - the cost of printed parts across all devices in a customer's Markforged fleet is calculated without any user involvement.
Estimated alternate manufacturing costs that are grounded in reality - a study of over 400 customer parts was used to find the median cost ratio between traditional manufacturing and manufacturing with Markforged.
New look for the Utilization Dashboard
The Utilization Dashboard has a new look and feel. It contains all of the data you’ve come to rely on but in a more user-friendly interface. With metrics on the number of print jobs, material usage, print time, and printer utilization, it continues to be a great resource for evaluating the performance of your fleet.
This is just the beginning
The objective of the ROI Dashboard is to provide you with the data you need to make data-driven, cost-effective decisions for your business. With this dashboard, we are making it easy to estimate savings realized through manufacturing your parts with Markforged printers - and this is just the beginning. Over time, the ROI Dashboard will be enhanced with additional metrics, the ability to enter known costs like labor and energy, filters to isolate a given device or user, and more. All of these updates will allow you to evaluate the return on your investment in greater detail and with more accuracy.
What would you like to see in the ROI Dashboard? Fill out this brief form and let us know!
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