3D Printing

Effective spare parts management is crucial for maintaining product uptime, especially with the shift towards servitization (when customers pay for the use of equipment rather than buy it themselves), to avoid high costs and reduce the risk of lost sales if machines stand idle because spare parts are unavailable. The irregular and still hard to predict demand for spare parts, coupled with the need to keep stock for the duration of a product’s lifecycle (depending on the longevity of the product), present a challenge for aftermarket logistics.

Creating and storing digital part files on cloud and printing these items on demand gives companies flexibility in managing the supply chain, reducing inventory, optimizing warehouse storage space, and achieving shorter lead times. This can be attained by setting up decentralized local 3D printing facilities. A logistics company can take advantage of this opportunity and build servicing capability by, for example, partnering with local 3D printing services or producing spare parts in-house, and can use its supply chain network to deliver parts on time.

3D printing can play an important role in enabling companies to reach their sustainability strategy targets, as it reduces waste through the process of building a product layer by layer rather than subtracting and discarding materials, which is common in conventional production processes. 3D printing is also an enabler for decentralized production reducing transportation distances. And it offers ways to optimize product design by eliminating the design constraints of traditional manufacturing, which in turn reduces material use.

Increased investment in material research and development has resulted in the creation of environmentally friendly materials such as ABS and bio-based materials which help reduce the carbon footprint. Leveraging 3D printing therefore results in less need for waste logistics and reduces overall carbon emissions during the printing process. Within logistics and the supply chain, the benefits of advances in the field of materials science (such as using more lightweight materials to build airplane parts and sustainable packaging material) also bring more opportunities to reduce the carbon footprint.

In logistics, 3D printing enables rapid prototyping, too. A good example of this is the creation of parts for automation trials, when it is better for new concepts to ‘fail fast’ rather than incur long lead times before a result is achieved. At DHL, one of our in-house technology teams has used 3D printing to develop a grabber for robotic arms deployed in supply chains.

Creating sample products for logistics operations could take weeks from design to prototype but, with 3D printing, this can be reduced to days, allowing logistics planners to minimize the optimization window. For logistics applications requiring high levels of design customization or flexibility, on-site printed automation parts are likely to accelerate project turnover and optimize goods flow. Obtaining bespoke parts is not just much faster; it can also be much more cost effective and sustainable.

To use 3D printing as an alternative to conventional production methods in the supply chain requires more documentation, along with new quality standards and product testing methods suited to this new type of manufacturing.