Achieving Supply Chain Resilience Through Additive Manufacturing

ABSTRACT

Disruptive events such as natural disasters become increasingly frequent, demonstrating the need for resilient supply systems. Additive manufacturing (AM) is an emerging technology which can help to solve supply bottlenecks as seen during SARS-CoV-2. AM was able to mitigate supply bottlenecks of medical spare parts, in times when globally arranged traditional supply sources failed. This chapter presents and discusses how AM can help to increase resilience. For this purpose, our contribution examines modern portfolio theory and the interplay of a hedged sourcing approach (traditional, formative with AM). This is assessed by using a single case study. The results indicate that using AM as a hedged source of supply to traditional supply sources increases the overall resilience of the supply system. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.