Protolabs has expanded its capabilities by offering full-service production to assist businesses at all stages of their product life cycles, from early prototyping and preproduction to large-scale manufacturing and end-of-life product support.
Protolabs, founded in 1999, offered injection-moulded plastic prototypes. It quickly expanded into metals, then CNC machining, and eventually opened global facilities. By 2014, it had launched 3D printing services to move from early prototyping to low-volume production. In 2017, it added sheet metal fabrication to its digital manufacturing portfolio, and in 2021, it acquired Hubs to expand its global manufacturing network.
Protolabs now offers full-service production
To keep up with the expansion, Protolabs' customer experience is evolving. In addition to immediate online access to instant quoting, customers can now communicate directly with a team of production experts for project management. Protolabs and its network partners provide assistance with the quoting platform and file uploads to help customers navigate orders with complex bill of materials, as well as strategic sourcing. Operations specialists can help with logistics fulfilment, while applications engineers can collaborate with customers to optimise 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 reorganised Protolabs' business structure in parallel to strengthen the partnership, providing customers with a more streamlined prototyping-to-production experience.
“Our regional organisations are now entirely focused on ensuring the best possible customer engagement and experience, and we have a global operations organisation with the sole responsibility of seamlessly fulfilling customer part orders as a single unified offering,” Bodor explains.
“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.”
- Luca Mazzei, Strategic Growth Officer, Protolabs
The concept of a "comprehensive offer" becomes tangible as Protolabs continues to expand its four flagship service lines as well as its manufacturing capabilities. High-volume manufacturing with lower piece-part pricing is feasible across services; high-requirement moulding, as well as verification and validation processes, are available to better serve the quality assurance and certification needs of industries such as medical devices; and advanced polymers and metals in 3D printing will enable sectors such as aerospace to 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.”
