Supply chain implications of additive manufacturing: a holistic synopsis through a collection of case studies

Abstract

To carry out a comprehensive analysis of additive manufacturing (AM) technologies, two major aspects need to be considered. Firstly, identification of AM’s capabilities in manufacturing final products in industry requires an accurate evaluation of their impacts across all supply chain stages. Secondly, making products additively entails potential consequences for different product lifecycle phases, e.g., design, preparation, production, usage, etc. that need to be managed accordingly. The current study tries to jointly address these two aspects by focusing on an extensive review of qualitative and quantitative cases taken from literature, as well as empirical observations made in industry. The study shows that impacts of AM technologies are not partial or isolated disruptions, but rather encompass a range of changes whose overall consequences spread across different phases of supply chain. Another result of the study is that a benchmarking of AM and conventional technologies on their overall performance is exhaustive only when all features of productions and logistics networks are evaluated simultaneously, rather than in their isolated states.