Designing intelligently with additive manufacturing

At IntelliDesign, additive manufacturing isn’t treated as a novelty. It’s a practical tool that helps the team move faster, solve problems earlier and deliver better outcomes for customers operating in some of Australia’s most demanding industries.

And sometimes, when timeframes are tight and conventional manufacturing can’t keep up, it’s the only solution that will do.

Like other leading Australian contract electronics manufacturers, IntelliDesign has built its reputation by thriving in high-mix, low-volume environments where reliability matters and failure isn’t an option. Working across sectors including defence, medical technology and industrial applications, the Brisbane-based company has spent more than three decades helping customers turn ideas into market-ready products.

Founded in 1995, IntelliDesign has grown from a small medical device design business into an organisation of around 130 employees. According to Head of Industrial Design Jonathan Tighe, one of the company’s strengths lies in its ability to support customers across the entire product lifecycle.

“We’re a little bit unique in Australia in that we offer two core services” he explained.

“We’ll offer a design and manufacturing service. We also offer what we call a contract manufacturing service, where a customer has an existing design and needs somebody to manufacture it and supply it.”

Around 30 per cent of the business falls into the latter category, much of it supporting defence applications.

From understanding user requirements and specifying electronics, through to software development, enclosure design, assembly and manufacturing, IntelliDesign helps customers navigate the complex path from concept to commercial product.

Engineering for demanding environments

While IntelliDesign products rarely carry the company’s own name, their impact is significant.

The business develops and manufactures products used in specialised industrial and medical settings where quality, durability and compliance are critical.

One example is its work with WabTech, designing systems that help improve safety across mining operations.

“They’re displays and computing platforms that go into mining vehicles on sites to ensure that you don’t have collisions between massive haul trucks the size of apartment blocks and small regular utes with people in them,” said Tighe.

“We designed and manufacture the hardware system, supply it to them, Wabtec handle all the application level software and then they sell it all around the world.”

Printing to learn faster

IntelliDesign wasn’t an especially early adopter of additive manufacturing. Its first 3D printer arrived in 2016.

Today, the company operates around eight machines and has embedded additive manufacturing into its design and development process as a way to accelerate learning and reduce risk.

The philosophy is simple: print early and print often.

“I tell the development team to treat the printers like you would a paper printer in the corner,” said Tighe. “Print aggressively.”

Before additive manufacturing became part of the workflow, teams would spend days or weeks refining a design before sending parts away for manufacture. Weeks later, the components would return for testing, often revealing new issues to resolve.

“That process took several weeks to a few months,” he said. “[Now], you’re doing it in a couple of hours.”

The result is faster iteration, earlier validation and a development culture built around learning quickly and refining continuously.

Beyond prototyping, the printers are used in “a plethora” of jigs and fixtures and holders and adapters, which can be made very quickly, cheaply and effectively, to improve efficiency across the factory floor.

The right tool for the right job

For IntelliDesign, additive manufacturing is not the answer to every challenge.

“It’s just one mechanism to get a customer where they need to be,” said Tighe.

Selecting the right manufacturing approach depends on the application, economics and performance requirements.

In some cases, advances in high-grade polymers make additive manufacturing an attractive option for larger components that would otherwise require expensive tooling investment.

In others, the value lies in speed.

Earlier this year, IntelliDesign was approached by a startup that needed to deliver 18 units of a device to a customer interstate within three weeks.

With a limited budget and little margin for delay, traditional manufacturing simply couldn’t meet the timeline.

“We knew we were going to need a week and a half just to design one of the parts,” said Tighe. “That wouldn’t have left enough time for outsourcing and fabrication of the of the parts needed..”

The solution combined multiple manufacturing approaches. Components where appearance mattered were designed to be sourced locally using short lead time processes, while internal parts that were hidden from view were produced in-house using additive manufacturing.

“It was a really good fit between the customer, the problem and the technology,” he said.

“From the outside, it looked manufactured rather than like a 3D printed prototype. But under the hood, inside, it was all 3D printed.”

Making manufacturing more agile

IntelliDesign’s experience highlights an important shift in how additive manufacturing is creating value for Australian industry.

Success isn’t defined by replacing every conventional process. It’s about understanding where additive manufacturing delivers a clear advantage — whether that’s accelerating development, reducing tooling costs, enabling customisation or helping businesses respond quickly when traditional supply chains fall short.

Used intelligently, additive manufacturing becomes more than a production technology.

It becomes a capability that helps manufacturers innovate faster, solve problems differently and deliver outcomes that might otherwise not be possible.