I have recently written about Proto Labs (PRLB) for Seeking Alpha. Making a long story short, I see Proto Labs as a cloud manufacturing company. It has a huge amount of manufacturing capacity concentrated in its locations, and it uses a digital thread to allow customers to manage the production process. That allows small companies, without enough production resources, to bring small batches quickly to market.
There have been some operating issues, namely the Rapid acquisition and changing the CNC production facilities. The integration of Rapid brought unanticipated problems related to the digital thread