Resilience in supply chains - How additive manufacturing enables a resilient supply chain

Abstract

Resilience - the ability to deal with crises and recover from their effects as quickly as possible - has been glorified since the COVID-19 pandemic as the new miracle cure against the effects for disruptions that occur in the future. Especially for Germany as an export-oriented location, the resilient design of supply chains is an economic success factor. However, a strategic anchoring of resilience thinking in management as well as the use of future-oriented technologies are necessary to harness the potentials of a robust, agile, adaptive and integrative supply chain. Additive manufacturing, due to its digital "DNA" and great design freedom, has the potential to more efficiently create or drive supply chain resilience. Redundancy due to inventories, for example, becomes obsolete due to the location-independent, flexible production of required products without long start-up times on the basis of computer-aided design files. Companies in a supply chain also do not have to bear the investment risk for additive manufacturing machines due to new, data-based business models. For many manufacturing companies and entrepreneurial alliances in the form of a supply chain, the question is therefore increasingly whether additive manufacturing technology can be increasingly used as an instrument to increase resilience along the supply chain in the future. The study "Resilience in Supply Chains - How Additive Manufacturing Enables a Resilient Supply Chain" sheds light on this economic and also ecologically valuable question and presents potential data-driven business models for the technology sector.