In our blog on the 5 hidden challenges that hold back your print farm, we discussed how having more product offerings increases complexity. While flexibility is one of the strengths of 3D printing operations, being too flexible can lead to an inefficient operation. In today’s blog, we’ll go through a scenario to demonstrate how you can reduce flexibility without losing sales - and how you can leverage this to scale.

Setting The Scene

As a refresh, here was our base scenario from the last article:

Say you sell box sets of ornaments during the holiday season. As soon as November hits, you suddenly become overwhelmingly busy. This past season, you actually had to mark products as out of stock because you couldn’t deal with the demand. Ultimately, you want to scale your print farm, but you’re already stretched thin managing the printers you currently have and the spike in demand is very seasonal right now. It’s time for a change.

On your product page, customers have the choice between:

• 5 colour options: red, green, blue, gold, or silver
• 3 size options: small, medium, large
• Optional add-on: matching tree-topper (for an additional fee)

At first glance, this seems reasonable. A few colour options mixed with a couple size variations and an optional tree-topper doesn’t sound like too much work. But a closer look reveals complexities - even though there are only a couple options, there are actually 45 different SKUs in this single product, and anywhere from 6 - 18 print files.

Each colour can be printed in each size, which gives us a base of 15 prints, and each of those options can be combined with a tree-topper or sold standalone, which triples the amount of SKUs.

Reducing Complexity

With disproportionately high demand during the one season, and unnecessarily complex operations taking up precious time, it’s time to strategically reduce your product offerings. Of course, you never want to get rid of your best seller, so here’s what we recommend: analyze your past quarter of orders and see which products (and which product options) made up 80%-90% of your sales. Then, cut the rest from your offerings.

Not only does this simplify your production management, it also makes it easier to keep a buffer stock in case of a sudden surge of orders.

Original Offerings

Let’s assume your gold and silver filament uses the same profile. Here’s your current operation:

And here is the breakdown of orders by product option:

Round 1: Reduce Colours

Reducing colour options allows us to stock fewer filament colours during the holiday season and cuts the number of filament switches required to deal with incoming orders.

If we eliminate any colour options that were purchased by less that 10% of our customer base, we can lower complexity without impacting the majority of our customer base. In this case, we would stop offering green and blue, so our operation looks like this:

Round 2: Reduce Size Options

Fewer sizes means fewer print files to juggle, further simplifying your production. Following our 10% rule, we can stop selling the Small size. Now, production looks even simpler:

Round 3: Reduce Add-Ons

Since only 8% of people ordered the star topper add-on, we can safely eliminate it without hurting sales. Now production looks like this:

Introducing Custom Requests

If you’re worried that eliminating these options might lose you business, you can always introduce a custom order option, which makes customers pay a premium for adding complexity to your operations. This way, customers can truly personalize their order, but you get compensated for the additional work this requires. You can also configure this as a request so you can choose which orders to take on.

For print shops that see flexibility as a core value proposition, this option allows you to strike a balance between customer service and operational sustainability.

Summing Up

Now when you’re prepping for the next holiday season, you can start building a stock ahead of time without having to somehow manage 45 different possible combinations made from 30 different parts. Actually processing and printing orders when demand increases is much simpler, as you can easily allocate certain printers to certain colours.

Just by cutting the bottom 10% of our product offerings, we have drastically reduced our labour during peak season, which means we have more time to spend on marketing, upselling, and maximizing printer output.