One of the key topics at this year’s TCT Conference @ Formnext Connect was ‘supply chain’, an area where additive manufacturing (AM) offered a temporary lifeline amid manufacturing disruptions earlier this year, not least in the manufacture of critical items like PPE. Echoing that heightened adoption, in a report authored by HP, which surveyed more than 2,000 3D printing and digital manufacturing ‘decision-makers’ over the summer, 79% shared the idea that 3D printing could help sure up supply chains and make them more agile.
In this presentation, Dr Jennifer Johns of University of Bristol shares data around the current and potential role of additive manufacturing to increase supply chain resilience. Throughout, Johns discusses motivations behind reshoring manufacturing and the potential for relocalising production, including distributed manufacturing.
While examples this year have pitched AM as a “magic bullet” in supply chain, additive’s role is actually much more nuanced, as Johns explained: “I think we’re going to end up with a very complex picture of reshoring, of distributed manufacturing and dual sourcing and they will be mixed together and that complexity will create challenges, particular for policy making and for manufacturing but there is a clear role for additive in all three of those scenarios.”
Watch the presentation on-demand here.
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