Case Study: GrabCAD Shop scales production of 100,000+ COVID-19 face shields with Proto3000

GrabCAD SHOP Made it Possible to Get Thousands of Face Shields to COVID-19 Front Lines

GrabCAD Shop faced an urgent PPE coordination challenge at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic: hospitals and frontline responders needed large quantities of face shields quickly, and requests had to be matched to volunteer manufacturers. Vendor Proto3000, alongside Stratasys and other partners, joined a community 3D-printing effort and helped leverage the GrabCAD Shop software to organize and route those requests.

Proto3000 and partners used GrabCAD Shop to set up a virtual model shop, upload orders (typically in batches of 100), monitor incoming request volumes and material inventory, and track CAD files, acceptable materials, completion times and shipping. That coordinated workflow enabled more than 100 partner printers (from a pool of some 600 companies) to scale production and resulted in the production and delivery of over 100,000 face shields to hospitals — a measurable impact driven by Proto3000's participation and the GrabCAD Shop platform.

GrabCAD Shop

Anirudh Krishnakumar

Shop Product Manager