SUPPLY CHAIN
THE ROLE OF 3D PRINTING IN FUTURE SUPPLY CHAINS
Sam & Laura speak to several industry personnel to understand the potential role of 3D printing technology in more agile manufacturing supply chains.
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n California, a collaborative effort involving Forecast 3D takes just three months to go from design development of a nasopharyngeal swab to additively manufacturing a million FDA-approved units. In South Carolina, Johnson & Johnson’s (J&J) Ethicon brand works with PRISMA Health to additively manufacture an FDAauthorised ventilator expansion splitter that enables a single ventilator to be used for two rescuable COVID-19 patients until individual ventilators come available. In Texas, Essentium designs a 3D printable face mask that is additively manufactured tens of thousands of times over ten weeks before its injection moulding tooling is ready, and a more traditional method can shoulder the burden. And then it keeps printing supplementary masks alongside. There were many more examples all over the world of 3D printing filling gaps of stretched supply chains as the COVID-19 pandemic caused disruptions from the Far East to the West Coast. It quickly sparked conversations about the need for more agile and resilient supply chains, and in this industry, how important 3D printing is to the transformation of these supply networks. For Steve Richardson, Forecast 3D’s Business Development Manager who focused on supply chain development on an international scale while in the electronics industry, there’s much that needs to go into a supply chain to make it agile – “you have to have visibility throughout the value stream, knowing that you have one focal point, normally the OEM, orchestrating all the different pieces, and we have to have data-driven decisions.” – but having seen up close the capabilities of 3D printing, he is in no doubt that it has its place: “What I really took away from the pandemic was how dynamic the supply chain can be with additive manufacturing.” Speaking to TCT in the autumn of 2020, having surveyed 2,000 manufacturing business leaders about trends in digital manufacturing, HP’s World Wide General
“After COVID, nobody can say failures are not anticipated.”
Manager of 3D Printing, Ramon Pastor, noted how the ‘resiliency of a supply chain is the resiliency of the worst part of said supply chain.’ Around 12 months ago, as offshore factories closed down as a result of the spread of COVID-19, manufacturing organisations around the world learnt that the hard way.
COMPLEX CONSIDERATIONS
In the 2019 Global Services Location Index, which lists the most attractive locations to produce goods, India, China, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam topped the rankings, with Thailand joining the United States and United Kingdom in the top eight. Notably, though the US and UK excelled in ‘people skills and availability’, ‘business environment’ and ‘digital resonance’, they lacked in ‘financial attractiveness’. Because so much emphasis has been placed on lowering costs within many manufacturing organisations, the effectiveness and resiliency in many cases had been neglected. As Richardson pointed out, “If a company has a mindset of, ‘we’re going to be low cost’, every decision that supply chain makes is based on having the lowest cost product in the market.” Companies and entire industries were
rocked upon the spread of COVID-19. In a Deloitte survey carried out last year, 59% of respondents said they saw a slowdown in sales and challenges to their cash flow, with 22% noting their inability to directly serve customers was the main negative impact on their business during the pandemic. “COVID caused every company in the world to look at their supply chain and say, ‘I can’t tolerate this, I have to have more flexibility,’” said 3D Systems CEO Jeff Graves in a recent interview with TCT.
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