The Additive Manufacturing Transformation in a Rapidly Changing Industry Landscape: Empowering Resilient Supply Chains with 3D Printing

In the recent years, we have seen strong technological advancements in additive manufacturing. Manufacturing companies can now build on the technology to create parts for serial manufacturing. This presentation will reflect on the transformatory challenges of the shift from prototyping to manufacturing 3D printing use cases and how to master this transition to the benefit of operations. The future of 3D printing will be driven by manufacturing applications. However, it is not trivial to identify the most suitable parts for additive manufacturing out of a portfolio of multiple parts that a manufacturing company has in its offering. This presentation will discuss a case study from the Energy Sector on how to leverage an Additive Manufacturing Opportunity Screening Tool into which a set of SKUs/parts is loaded into to identify not only the right parts for 3D printing but to also get a recommendation on which is the most appropriate technology to use. Moreover, manufacturing companies can now build on the technology to form distributed production networks to make their operations more efficient, more resilient, and more sustainable. We present a framework ensuring the right design choices and identify most suitable applications for distributed manufacturing.