Read how they achieved repeatable, high accuracy production of low volumes not attainable by injection molding.
Customer
TE Connectivity
Headquarters
Schaffhausen, Switzerland; Berwyn, Pennsylvania, United States
Employees
50,000+
TE Connectivity, a world leader in the production of connectors and sensors, manufactures 192 billion parts annually for its global customer base across all Industries, from aerospace to appliances and automotive. For each of their customers, TE must address the best way to meet customer requirements to ensure a timely design, and production costs allow for an acceptable ROI.
The global trend is an ever-increasing compression of product design cycles. When TE Connectivity wanted to address customer needs for fast turn designs of production-ready connectors and accessories, the hunt for the perfect 3D printing solution and materials to solve the problem began in earnest.
As a world leader in the manufacturing of high-performance connectors and accessories, TE Connectivity required precise accuracy and repeatability across systems in a manufacturing line without fail, all while maintaining a build rate exceeding 10 parts per hour to ensure scalable production.
“With the emergence of DLP and particularly the Origin printer, we were able to print a whole range of products that we weren't able to before both in terms of resolution, accuracy and new materials,” said Mark Savage, Senior Manager, Additive Manufacturing of TE Connectivity. “It makes the business value really attractive and we're anticipating many of our high mix low volume products can be now 3D printed instead of injection molded.”
TE Connectivity chose Stratasys’ Origin printer over other printers because of its reliability as well as accuracy and surface finish. With printed parts almost similar to injection mold parts; they see that some of our customers can't even tell the difference.
Mark Savage: “The reason we like the Origin platform so much is: it enabled us to use almost any materials for our specific business units. For example: fire, smoke and toxicity. We couldn’t do this with any other platform.”
TE Connectivity makes 190 billion products a year, something of that order. Savage: “Where Origin really helps us, is to produce products at those low volumes that otherwise wouldn't have been attainable by injection molding.
