One of the more important and appealing applications of fractional ownership of manufacturing equipment is for low-volume manufacturing that can now be cost-effective while maintaining ownership and building an asset base.

In the past, a low-volume manufacturer’s typical cost-effective solution was to outsource. While this may be a viable solution in most outsourcing cases, the company is not able to invest into asset ownership while building its inventory. In fact, when a company outsource, it is helping to pay for the assets of another company. Much like renting a house pays the mortgage of the actual home owner.

Tangible Express has created a cost-effective solution that is an alternative to outsourcing. Through Fractional Ownership, businesses have found that they can build inventory and acquire assets for about the same cost as outsourcing. The reason this works is because you only invest in the amount of the machine that is needed to produce the volumes required. There is no waste of money on inventories resulting from high volume runs. And yet you can achieve the same per-part cost efficiencies.

Here is a simple graph to illustrate this effect in a given scenario.

In this case, break even quantity on the cost per-part is 566 using fractional ownership, whereas break even quantity with full ownership is 10,800. The only variable that changes these two quantities is the initial investment into the asset. While the data is fictional, the principle is not. This model is currently being used at Tangible Express with rapid prototyping equipment with great success.