Bringing new products to market faster is a significant competitive advantage of digital molding. The ability to update designs on the fly with immediate impact introduces new agility and flexibility to an otherwise fixed or costly process.
The Benefit of Digital Molding
Digital molding with Figure 4 technology can do more than save time and money in production – it enables previously impossible products, timelines, and capabilities. When you use additive manufacturing to go directly from a design file into production, new doors open.
Figure 4 offers an alternative to tooling that is compact, affordable, mobile, and relatively immediate when compared to traditional tooling. Instead of taking the extra steps to design and manufacture tooling to bring your product into production, digital molding allows you to go directly into production once your product design file is ready. Six Sigma repeatability (Cpk > 2) across all Figure 4 materials makes Figure 4 the most accurate 3D printing technology available.
1. Products
Digital molding brings the digital design flexibility of additive manufacturing to end-use production and enables distinct outputs to be produced in the same production batch. This capability is available alongside the ability to produce long- and short-run batches. 
It allows you to mass customization for personalized and one-off goods. It also has the ability to accurately create complex end-use parts with industrial-grade materials virtually on the spot with Figure 4 can be up to 20% more affordable than traditional manufacturing.
2. Cost
Producing parts immediately with tool-less digital molding is a unique competitive advantage that allows 3D Systems’ users to avoid or offset tooling costs by delivering parts without delay.
It is a cost-effective option for low volume production. Figure 4 offers a workaround for minimum order quantities and an alternative to holding inventory for legacy parts that cost money and take up space.
3. Timelines
Product development moves no faster than the ideas and creativity behind it. When prototyping a product can happen within hours instead of days, the reduced time lag between idea and feedback not only makes product development faster but also smarter.
Achieving prototypes in hours, rather than days or weeks, enables companies to significantly improve product time-to-market as well as deliver a superior product within that shortened time. With 3D printed prototypes designers can have new iterations of a design prototyped daily, enabling the evaluation of 12-15 new iterations of a design in the same time that 1 prototype could have been produced using traditional processes. This increased frequency of iterations means that the designers have time and opportunity to improve the designs while still delivering within or before the deadline.
4. Capabilities
Many times the need for a short production run can kill a project, simply because the costs are too high for short-run production and return on investment is non-existent. With Figure 4, you can mass manufacture without a production line and also consolidate components into a single build with no minimum order quantities.
With 3D Printing, you can produce replacement parts on demand without inventory and it also has the flexibility to update part design without equipment overhaul.