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Certificate Courses & Manufacturing Matters! Additive Manufacturing Certificate Course & Exam offered by Society of Manufacturing Engineers and MSOE. A session at Manufacturing Matters! will provide an overview of the technology. Although the process has been available for a quarter of a century, additive manufacturing, once limited to industrial giants, is gaining traction for manufacturers of all sizes. Additive manufacturing is a process in which a three-dimensional solid object is created from a digital model. Also known as 3D printing or rapid prototyping, among a host of other names, the process involves adding successive layers of materials to build objects of various shapes and sizes. Prototyping has been the technology's most widespread application to this point. The fastest-growing use, however, is in the actual manufacturing of parts for final products. "But one of the reasons why there is considerable excitement, and one might say anxiety, among some companies is that now you in fact can create fully functional parts, even made out of metal. Additive manufacturing is going to have huge implications for the manufacturing industry as a whole," said Raj Veeramani, executive director of the University of Wisconsin E-Business Consortium. Additive manufacturing allows companies to quickly respond to changes in demand from customers and to address ever-shrinking product life cycles, Veeramani said. Parts also can be created using far fewer resources through additive manufacturing, since there tends to be fewer processing steps, less assembly, lower amounts of waste material and requires less energy. "As parts and products become increasingly complex, this particular class of technologies is going to lend a significant advantage," he said. Other benefits of additive manufacturing include small lot production; optimized design; reverse engineering; and complex part manufacturing. MSOE's Rapid Prototyping Center Staff Rapid Prototyping Consortium at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, who has been involved in the additive manufacturing sector for more than 17 years. Veeramani also noted that United Parcel Service earlier this year launched 3D printing services in certain locations across the United States. "The goal for us is to help leverage this technology," Kamara said. "In Wisconsin, we do a lot of manufacturing and we are good at it, but we need to take a look at this technology a little bit more." "You ship them a CAD model and you go and pick it up," he said. "What manufacturer would have ever dreamed that UPS could become a competitor?" Additive manufacturing, simply put, is the process of joining materials, he said. "The challenges are how we can use design tools to meet demands, Kamara said. The Society of Manufacturing Engineers, in cooperation with the Milwaukee School of Engineering and the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute, established a team of advisors that defined the additive manufacturing "body of knowledge," which serves as the basis for a new additive manufacturing certificate program offered in February at MSOE. The National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute is working to accelerate and integrate additive manufacturing technologies to the U.S. manufacturing sector and increase domestic manufacturing competitiveness. The publicprivate consortium involves more than 100 organizations, including manufacturers, research universities and nonprofits. "Trying to define this was a problem," said Sheku Kamara, director of the HACCP Certification One-Day Review Seminar www.manufacturingmatters.org An intensive one-day course designed to achieve HACCP competency Conformance with GFSI (Global Food Safety Initiative) and regulatory standards require that companies develop and maintain a robust food safety system. HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) is the foundation upon which a strong food safety system sits. Demonstrable competency in HACCP and its principles is essential when building a good food safety system and WMEP's HACCP training course will provide the tools to achieve success. Learn more at www.wmep.org www.wmep.org