Unique Short Tree Design & Upholstery in Rochester Hills will mark its fifth anniversary on July 15 — a remarkable achievement, considering the COVID-19 pandemic threatened its existence.

“We were open just six months before the pandemic hit,” said founder and owner Tammy Packard. “The good news was that we didn’t have a lot of processes set up and the bad news was we were just starting out and needed to make money to survive.”

The company specializes in commercial and residential furniture — creating safety walls for hospitals, restaurant booths and benches, and residential work including reupholstering and renovating pieces to keep them out of landfills.

When Packard saw that Oakland County and Automation Alley were providing 3D printers and training to small- and medium-sized businesses during the pandemic, she applied and was accepted.

How the company has used the 3D printer is an example of why Oakland, Macomb and Wayne counties’ officials agreed to join or expand participation in Automation Alley’s Project Diamond, an acronym for Distributed Independent and Agile Manufacturing On Demand, and why Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wants to make it a statewide initiative.

The county was a natural choice to lead the project because it is home to 2,662 small- and medium-sized businesses. The county also has 42% of Metro Detroit’s research and development facilities, many of which connected to the automotive industry and its suppliers.

The expansion will allow as many as 9,100 small manufacturers across all three counties to join the project. The printers combine artificial intelligence robotics and 3D printing and are networked among manufacturers to lower costs and increase production.

Packard said the pandemic made her think beyond a supply chain bottleneck.

In one case, a customer who wanted a single piece reupholstered while waiting for a furniture order ended up bringing in two more pieces to be renovated.

Deputy County Executive Sean Carlson said while Project Diamond started with a focus on producing equipment to fight the pandemic, county and Automation Alley officials want to build a local manufacturing network that can compete globally “so that we would become less reliant on overseas manufacturing.”

Packard was a commercial truck product manager for nearly 30 years before changing careers. She knew enough about 3D printing that she could see benefits to her small business.

“Our biggest use of 3D is taking a unique piece, like a rosette on a wooden desk that needs to be replaced, digitizing the design and reproducing a paintable or stainable piece,” she said. The printer she uses creates items from base material made of nylon or carbon fiber.

A single 3D printer made Unique Short Tree “more limber than other design centers and that made us more competitive,” Packard said.

Project Diamond’s 3D printers come with conditions. Companies can get them for free or at a low cost but must agree to use them to support emergency needs. During the pandemic, the 3D network made face shields and masks and, after Russia invaded Ukraine, made tourniquets.

Digital design and printing is part of Industry 4.0, an umbrella term for advanced material, data, the use of artificial intelligence and other innovations.

Traditional manufacturing is done by either creating a part out of material or forming an item from material. Each process is inflexible and expensive.

A 3D printer transforms a base material into a part one thin layer at a time with heat that bonds the layers into a single piece. This is called additive manufacturing.

A single person can design a prototype and use a 3D printer to create and perfect a part before mass production.

“Traditional manufacturing and design tend to be worlds apart, where designers create a prototype and make it work then throw it over a wall and some manufacturing engineer has to figure out how to make it,” said Pavan Muzumdar, Automation Alley’s chief operating officer and Project Diamond’s CEO. “Additive manufacturing completely upends that model.”

In announcing Project Diamond’s expansion last month during the Mackinac Policy Conference, Whitmer said 3D printing is one way to address some of the state’s biggest challenges: recruiting and keeping people in Michigan to help small businesses compete on a global scale.

She said the project’s goal is extending the printers, training and network to all of Michigan’s 83 counties to make Michigan a national model for networked technology.

How quickly the project can expand across the state remains to be seen, based on how many companies apply for Automation Alley’s program.

Automation Alley was created 25 years ago to address a shortage of technology workers in the metro area. The late L. Brooks Patterson, then Oakland County’s executive, created the group with 42 members to rebrand the state as equal to Silicon Valley and improve worker recruitment and retention.

By 2014, Automation Alley was a financially independent organization with a record of trade missions and economic development. In 2015, the group adopted an Industry 4.0 strategy — some call it the fourth industrial revolution — to get ahead of rapid changes in digital and physical production.

“Michigan has dominated manufacturing for the last century or so,” said Muzumdar, adding that long-time manufacturers have so much invested in legacy machinery, workflows and culture they often delay shifting to a new platform or process.

Automation Alley, he said, wanted to raise awareness of how technology would disrupt traditional manufacturing.

That disruption helped Unique Short Tree fabricate a unique replacement part to hold fabric on patio sling chairs.

“There are maybe 20 different types of these parts that we need,” she said, explaining that buying commercially-made parts would mean getting as many as 1,000 when she needed 10. A bulk buy would mean storing or discarding unneeded parts, wasting money.

“Manufacturing is getting subsumed by software,” said Muzumdar, who has master’s degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. As fast as 3D printing is evolving, some early experiences have caused some companies to hesitate at large-scale adoption of the technology.

Improvements are happening fast, Muzumdar said.

One example of the speed of change is the progress from the 1988-era clunky single-pupose cell phones for making mobile calls to today’s smartphones that can connect to the internet and can be as powerful as laptop computers.

Every day that goes by (3D printing) becomes a little bit more ready for prime time, because it’s (improving) at exponential rates,” he said, adding that business owners shouldn’t assume they have lots of time to figure it out. “The assumptions we make today are not necessarily going to be true six months from now and definitely not a year from now.”

Since 2015, Automation Alley has shifted focus to get ahead of fast-moving digital innovation in manufacturing. That thinking is what led to Project Diamond at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

With businesses shut down, Automation Alley and the county partnered to keep small businesses open by providing 3D printers to 250 shops — Macomb County joined the effort and funded 50 additional printers — under an agreement that they would produce personal protective equipment on demand at a time when the supply chain was strangled by the pandemic response.

Oakland County spent $25 million on Project Diamond, adding 38 companies to the original 250. Macomb County spent $2 million.

The value of a 3D printer is its production flexibility.

“I can build a face shield. I can build a ventilator part … all I need is the design,” Muzumdar said.

Companies that applied for 3D printers during the pandemic were dubbed essential businesses, allowing them to stay open — another incentive to take a 3D printer, he said.

A few months into the pandemic, supply chains for protective equipment started to revive and local businesses didn’t need to produce gowns, face shields and masks. But when Russia invaded Ukraine, area businesses were asked to create components for tourniquets and more than 170 companies participated.

“We shipped 10,000 components in about a week and a half — that validated our network,” Muzumdar said.

Project Diamond’s first phase had a learning curve.

“Not all companies responded to the technology the same way,” Muzumdar said. “Some ran with it, some weren’t quite sure what to do. We developed a 12-week training program to show them how to use the printers, how to build business models and scale up production in a networked marketplace.”

Intellectual property was a concern, but he said the digital design files are encrypted. One company that needs to increase production quickly can send a digital file to other companies to produce parts, for example. The digital file limits how many parts can be produced by a company using the network and can’t be accessed after that, he said.

“They don’t necessarily buy equipment … the design is where the value is,” he said.

Manufacturing is an expensive business. A 3D network means the ability to make money from equipment that might otherwise sit idle. This also allows entrepreneurs to produce ideas without spending more on printers, materials and machinery. The person or company that creates the digital design owns and profits from the intellectual property.

“If you use Spotify, you don’t get the (computer file), you get to listen to a song and Spotify will make sure you pay your monthly fee,” he said.

That’s the shift manufacturers need to make — from being a parts maker to being a portfolio owner, he said.

Project Diamond will keep the process available to large and small manufacturers. There are companies, he said, that are trying to own the 3D manufacturing marketplace.

How will Project Diamond build a statewide networked manufacturing environment?

“We start in the metro area,” he said. “The funding is still being worked on but we have 250 companies in Oakland County and 50 in Macomb. We’re figuring out how Macomb and Wayne participate to move this forward.”

But there are potential risks. Anything networked and connected online is at risk for disuptions like the one the Ascension healthcare system recently experienced when a major ransomware cyberattack forced doctors and nurses to divert ambulances and use paper files because they couldn’t access electronic records. Automation Alley also has a cybersecurity division.

“Cybersecurity has to be taken seriously, just as the infrastructure and resilience has to be taken seriously,” he said.

During Phase 2, Carlson said the plan is to get 35% to 40% of the county’s small manufacturers to join the project, which will create an economic tipping point that makes it sustainable.

“We have discovered that Oakland County has the largest 3D printing network in the country and it is growing every day,” he said.

Carlson said it’s not clear how much more money the county will commit beyond the initial $25 million investment but “since we still have the most small manufacturing enterprises in the state it was important for us to lean in on this project.”

Project Diamond tracks how the 3D printers are used; Automation Alley can take back unused devices and give them to other businesses on a waiting list.

These days Packard is so busy at Unique Short Tree she schedules an appointment every week “just to catch my breath,” she said.

“Project Diamond would be an excellent way for a business to test using 3D printing,” she said, noting that weekly meetings with the 250 Phase 1 participants shared the various ways they used the printers in the assembly processes.

“One guy told us his drumsticks broke and he was playing in a band and needed replacements fast — so he designed and created a new pair on the 3D printer. If you can digitize an item and your printer is the right size, there are lots of things you can make,” she said.

While 3D printing may not meet every company’s production needs, Packard said, manufacturers would be wise to explore the possibilities sooner rather than later.

“I’m sure people thought Henry Ford was crazy when he said, ‘I’m going to make an assembly line’,” she said.

Project Diamond is a way to try 3D printing “and still have the safety net that you haven’t paid much for the machine or training.”

Automation Alley’s 2024 Integr8 Roundtable Summit is Oct. 3 in Detroit. https://www.integr8series.com/summit.

Applications are open for Oakland County’s small- and medium-size manufacturers to apply for a Project Diamond 3D printer and training. For details, visit https://www.projectdiamond.org/join-project-diamond-application.