Impact of Additive Manufacturing on Supply Chain Resilience During COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The use of Additive Manufacturing (AM) has become more widespread in recent years, covering different sectors. The increased interest in AM is due to the main benefits associated with its use, such as the possibility to produce even complex parts on demand and on the service site. These benefits have recently made researchers and practitioners hypothesize that AM can guarantee supply chain (SC) resilience, hence triggering their interest in AM as an emergency solution for SC disruptions. With the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, this hypothesis has been confirmed to be true. In fact, AM has been shown to be very effective in guaranteeing the restoration and reconstruction of the SC, especially in the production of medical equipment (e.g., face masks, valves for respirators, etc.). However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the impact of AM on SC resilience has never been quantified before. Similarly, the potentialities of AM to guarantee the resilience of an SC outside of the medical sector have been barely treated (and never in a quantitative way). In this work, we aim to fill these two gaps. To do so, starting from the global supply chain of a company selling lighting equipment (available in the literature), we evaluated the potential of adopting AM as an emergency solution in guaranteeing SC resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we considered 15 different scenarios where we considered the pandemic outbreak to be limited to the country of production as well as spread worldwide. From the results, the benefits of adopting AM, in terms of revenue, profit, service Level and lead time, were evident. Moreover, from the specific case considered we were also able to draw some general conclusions and suggest to SC managers when the use of AM would be beneficial.