3D Printing

Effective spare parts management is crucial for maintaining product uptime, especially with the shift towards servitization (when customers pay for the use of equipment rather than buy it themselves), to avoid high costs and reduce the risk of lost sales if machines stand idle because spare parts are unavailable. The irregular and still hard to predict demand for spare parts coupled with the need to keep stock for the duration of a product’s lifecycle (depending on the longevity of the product ) present a challenge for aftermarket logistics. Creating and storing digital part files on cloud and printing these on demand will give companies flexibility in managing the supply chain, reduce inventory, optimize warehouse storage space, and achieve shorter lead times. This can be attained by setting up decentralized local 3D printing facilities. A logistics company can take advantage of this opportunity and build servicing capability by, for example, partnering with local 3D printing services or producing spare parts in-house, and can use its supply chain network to deliver parts on time.

3D printing can play an important part in enabling companies to reach their sustainability strategy targets, as it reduces waste through the process of building a product layer by layer, rather than subtracting and discarding materials, which is the common process in traditional manufacturing. 3D printing is also an enabler for decentralized production and offers ways to optimize product design by eliminating the design constraints of traditional manufacturing, which in turn reduces material use. Increased investment in material research and development has resulted in the creation of environmentally friendly materials such as ABS and bio-based materials which help reduce the carbon footprint. Leveraging 3D printing therefore results in less need for waste logistics and reduces overall carbon emissions during the printing process. Within logistics and the supply chain, the benefits of advances in the field of material science (such as using more lightweight materials to build airplane parts and sustainable packaging material) also bring more opportunities to reduce the carbon footprint.