Manufacturing engineers call it the “death zone”. Some call it the “scaling conundrum”. Once a design is finalized, and a prototype made, it’s frequently expensive and difficult to create the pilot runs and small volume production that’s essential to test market and validate a new product. It’s far too expensive to tool up for mass production of a part or device based on only a single prototype, but how can an innovator bridge that gap?

At AU 2025 in Nashville, Tennessee, Autodesk Fusion Community Manager Jonathan Odom demonstrated a short run manufacturing platform that allows innovators to program and control multiple production technologies, from multi-axis machine tools to 3D printers, and significantly, to share designs with contract manufacturers that offer both manufacturing capacity and useful design expertise of their own. Is this the universal tool for making anything and everything? Odom explains all to Jim Anderton.

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engineering.com produces a number of video programs for the engineering professional found exclusively on engineering.com TV such as Designing the Future, Manufacturing the Future, and The Engineering Roundtable.

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