How Vestas and Würth Are Industrialising Additive Manufacturing: AMUG Convention 2025

A dialog between Würth Additive Group and Vestas on the 2025 AMUG Convention discusses additive manufacturing as a scalable software for managing provide chain danger, decreasing downtime, and aligning with digital and sustainability methods. 

AJ Strandquist, CEO of Würth Additive Group, and Jeremy Haight, Principal Engineer & Lead Specialist – Additive Manufacturing & Superior Ideas, at wind turbine chief Vestas, unpacked how tightly managed digital workflows, certified platforms, and strategic deployment are unlocking real-world worth from 3D printing. 

TLDR? Key Insights

Pressed for time? Listed below are the core insights from the expertise of Würth Additive Group and Vestas with additive manufacturing.

Assume when it comes to techniques

Requirements and qualification are lagging however essential

Additive manufacturing’s power is within the provide chain

Digital management and lockdown of processes are important

The trade suffers from a scarcity of interoperability

Backward compatibility is tough, ahead integration is best

High quality failures require root trigger evaluation, not blame

Additive Manufacturing’s Provide Chain Second: Würth and Vestas Eye Scale with Digital Stock, High quality Controls

Würth Additive Group and Vestas are constructing the infrastructure for additive manufacturing to maneuver past area of interest purposes and into global-scale, provide chain-critical roles.

Strandquist framed the chance—and the problem—with a contact of dry humor. “All of the occasion animals are on this room speaking about liabilities and high quality issues,” opening the session in Chicago. The 2 leaders are overseeing the deployment of additive manufacturing as a foundational functionality inside extremely structured industrial ecosystems.

Strandquist’s mandate is to combine additive manufacturing into Würth’s international logistics and distribution networks, embedding digital half success into conventional provide chains. The aim, he defined, is to make sure that clients can order 3D printed components with the identical ease and procedural traceability as legacy elements. “For us, wherever that demand comes from… they’re going to put an order right into a system,” he stated. “From that system, we’re going to combine so a purchaser sees the half on the display screen similar to anyone else does… [with] full traceability.”

The underlying imaginative and prescient is a seamless provide expertise—whether or not components are made historically, pulled from inventory, or 3D printed domestically on demand. This consists of modalities as numerous as merchandising machines and e-commerce.

The Würth AM chief attracts a distinction between cost-driven elements and demanding engineered components, noting that “high quality will not be constant”—and shouldn’t be. “I specialise in components which are very low price… like automotive clips,” he stated, contrasting this with Vestas’s use instances, which embody R&D prototypes and operational elements in high-risk environments. These variations demand scalable high quality regimes, equivalent to Manufacturing Half Approval Course of (PPAP), with ranges starting from “use any machine and any vendor” flexibility to traceability right down to uncooked materials origins. Haight highlighted the necessity to stability inside and exterior manufacturing whereas guaranteeing the sanctity of high quality documentation and design management.

Each executives harassed that additive manufacturing usually steps in as a second-source or emergency resolution. As Strandquist put it: “3D printing all the time does finest in [special] conditions. The value level doesn’t matter when one thing’s lacking.”

This flexibility introduces new issues round mental property and digital safety. Making certain that solely accepted information are used, and that they don’t seem to be modified or leaked, is vital.

Vestas and Würth Advance AM Provide Chains with Rigorous Controls and Distributed Infrastructure

The transition of additive manufacturing to an industrial-scale expertise calls for enterprise-grade techniques, traceability, and exact vendor management—alongside the bodily decentralization that defines the expertise’s core benefit.

“Throughout trade, particularly in heavy trade, additive is seen both as novelty—or one thing unique to aerospace and medical. Digital manufacturing removes that psychological barrier,” stated Haight. For a while, the time period “digital manufacturing,” or DVM was used at Vestas to take away this synthetic barrier to adoption.

Haight oversees a program that spans composite tooling, metallic elements, and concrete printing, all built-in into a worldwide enterprise stack. The structure ties in AM half manufacturing with Vestas’s present ERP, PLM, and asset administration techniques. “Proper off the printer, they get the half and the ISO 17025-qualified inspection report with it. That’s all tied into our enterprise asset administration system—fluid and automatic,” he defined.

The Vestas roadmap, already partially carried out, consists of cell items embedded in EVs that 3D print components en path to distant wind farms. 

Würth Additive Group is aligning its infrastructure accordingly. The CEO famous the significance of preserving manufacturing constancy with out introducing complexity on the buyer interface. Repeatability usually hinges on course of self-discipline, particularly in mid-volume purposes. One contributor described a manufacturing run of “beneath 100,000 per yr,” developed over seven years with a QA/QC pipeline embedded immediately into the companion firm’s techniques. The bottlenecks, unsurprisingly, have been in materials consistency and information loss as groups modified. Strandquist underscored this as a identified danger. “That was a residing course of, not a frozen one. I all the time say: freeze it, then you may thaw it and freeze it once more. However you by no means wish to be out of that frozen state very lengthy when you’ve got a manufacturing half.”

To fight fragmentation and preserve information self-discipline, Vestas operates on a strict ‘recipe’ mannequin when outsourcing AM work. “Now we have a professional machine, certified supplies with batch and lot traceability, and we merely present [vendors] a recipe,” Haight stated. “They’ll run it, do visible inspection, however that’s the restrict of what they’ll do.” Delicate IP is protected utilizing basic strategies equivalent to segmented manufacturing and sturdy NDAs—“generally you’re not going to get round it.”

Internally, Vestas has mapped out the additive panorama by expertise and enterprise operate—composites, metals, base polymers, concrete—and tied them to course of households, use instances, and ROI thresholds. The logic is surgical: match materials and course of capabilities on to part sorts, from turbine blade precast molds to rotor-stator assemblies and directional fiber reinforcement.

“We wish one thing that’s going to merge together with your ecosystem, not combat it,” Haight emphasised. 

Locking Down the Digital Manufacturing unit: Vestas and Würth Sort out IP Management, Operator Simplicity, and Legacy Components in AM Provide Chains

Additive manufacturing’s promise of distributed, on-demand manufacturing hinges not simply on expertise readiness however on governance, safety, and organizational alignment. Which means managing every thing from untrained discipline operators to multi-million-part inventories with automation, coverage enforcement, and strategic vendor choice.

“The folks within the discipline don’t must be consultants,” stated Haight. “We use RBAC—role-based entry management. These are pre-fixed recipes saved in our PLM. They’ll’t be modified. It’s locked down by design.”

This isn’t solely a matter of usability, but additionally of belief and compliance. Strandquist famous that errors and deviations are not often technological. “If you happen to can’t belief your folks to observe a regular working process, you may’t belief them with the rest,” he stated. “There’s no fixing deviancy. The very best you are able to do is design techniques so it’s laborious to cheat.”

Vestas, working throughout dozens of nations, avoids such danger by selecting closed ecosystem platforms and suppliers. Their preliminary AM rollout centered on closed-loop techniques with tight administrative controls. “We personal the mandate for additive,” stated Haight. “We wish to discourage non-compliant printers or supplies getting into our factories.”

In some instances, equivalent to concrete tower elements, Vestas ships the whole printing course of whereas sourcing uncooked supplies domestically. This avoids cross-border complexity whereas aligning with longer-term ambitions round circularity. “We’re engaged on reclaiming supplies and recomposing them into new AM workflows,” stated Haight. “Digital twin meets recyclability.”

That mannequin additionally opens a singular geopolitical benefit. “There aren’t any tariffs on emails but,” Strandquist quipped. “You possibly can rework materials in-country, keep away from customs points solely, and nonetheless ship a spec-inspected half. That’s an enormous benefit when issues get caught on the border.”

Nonetheless, essentially the most enduring problem lies in managing the legacy footprint. “We’ve obtained near 32 million SKUs in our PLM and DMS,” Haight stated. “In order that’s a job for software program.” Vestas makes use of automated half screening platforms to determine additive-suitable candidates, and in some instances, works immediately with operators beneath right-to-repair legal guidelines. Their discipline qualification metric is simple: one yr of steady fault-free operation.

For brand spanking new components, nevertheless, additive has extra traction—notably in long-lifecycle assist. “Wanting backward for AM is inherently laborious,” stated Strandquist. “The power is in designing for additive from the start. As soon as your manufacturing tooling wears out, the 3D printed model is already licensed as a result of it was within the unique take a look at batch.”

This forward-looking view additionally helps dynamic sourcing methods. Each Haight and Strandquist described additive as a bridge and fallback within the face of tooling delays or vendor outages. “It opens up different provide choices,” Haight stated. “You by no means wish to be single-source.”

Requirements, Provide Chains, and Stakeholder Belief: AM Leaders Urge Structural Maturity in Digital Manufacturing

The trade’s subsequent evolution relies upon much less on expertise than it does on institutional belief, interoperable requirements, and system-wide course of controls.

Regardless of the give attention to automation and documentation, failures nonetheless require forensic evaluation. “If an element breaks after 10,000 items, that’s not an AM challenge. That’s a design challenge,” stated Strandquist. “But when one breaks by itself, you begin wanting on the black field.”

Resistance from inside organisations stays a hurdle, particularly amongst engineers accustomed to legacy techniques. “A whole lot of them have been jaded by automation that solely delivered 30% of what was promised,” Haight stated. The response has been to show efficiency immediately: “Put the half of their hand. Show it.”

Environmental metrics—one other vital efficiency space—stay troublesome to quantify with confidence. Whereas Vestas aligns its AM programme with decarbonisation targets and Business 4.0 rules, the carbon math is elusive. “It’s an extremely advanced mannequin,” stated Haight. “We attempt, nevertheless it’s largely qualitative.” Strandquist agreed: “I haven’t seen a software I might wager my popularity on. There’s an excessive amount of nuance for a punch-in algorithm.”

Nonetheless, the commercial logic is tough to dispute. AM cuts downtime danger and stock prices. But the broader trade stays fragmented by design. Standardised machine communications and cross-platform compatibility are nonetheless lacking. “It’s like early railroads,” Strandquist stated. “Each state had a special gauge. They didn’t suppose nationally.” He warned that locking customers into proprietary techniques was self-defeating: “You don’t purchase computer systems that may’t discuss to one another. AM needs to be the identical.”

There are indicators of motion. Each leaders acknowledged the progress of teams like ASTM F42, which is engaged on standardised information packaging and pedigree dealing with. “To unlock AM’s full worth, new applied sciences should enter with sturdy vetting and a transparent enterprise case. “We take a look at expertise readiness degree and match it to an actual buyer want,” stated Strandquist. “That proof of idea is the place we study essentially the most.” 

“If we’re strategic and objectively searching for enterprise outcomes, we’ll discover a path,” Haight stated. “However you want the mandate, the metrics—and the buy-in.”

As additive manufacturing matures, its success will rely much less on machine efficiency and extra on system integration, regulatory readability, and cultural acceptance. For organisations keen to spend money on sturdy coaching, digital infrastructure, and strategic sourcing, the rewards embody provide chain agility, decrease stock danger, and long-term environmental alignment. 

The trail ahead calls for standardisation, openness, and the popularity that AM will not be a magic bullet—it’s a enterprise software. “It’s a shortcut on your provide chain,” Strandquist famous, “however provided that you deal with it like a part of the system, not one thing separate from it.”

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Featured picture exhibits a 3D printed half made with DF2+. Photograph by way of Würth Additive Group.