Supply chain modifications to improve additive manufacturing cost-benefit balance

Additive manufacturing (AM) offers unique production characteristics which among those, toollessness and production of complex geometries are potentially significant to operations efficiency. Previous research has illustrated the potential sufficiency of this technology to affect the supply chains‟ arrangements and enabling decentralized production configurations. While, one of the important advantages of AM enabled distributed production is the increased flexibility, which is a necessity in today‟s competitive and ever changing global supply chains, number of obstacles have kept this method from wide implementation. In this paper, we study the possible supply chain modifications to decrease the cost of an AM-enabled decentralized production system. In other words, we perform a cost-benefit analysis on various AM supply chain strategies in a spare parts context to realize the independent operational factors affecting the implementation cost of additive manufacturing. Moreover, we analyze the ways to adapt the supply chain management to enable full potential of AM considering the present technology.