This discussion paper aims to set out the key challenges and opportunities emerging from distributed manufacturing (DM). We begin by describing the concept, available definitions and consider its evolution where recent production technology developments (such as additive and continuous production process technologies), digitisation together with infrastructural developments (in terms of IoT and big-data) provide new opportunities.To further explore the evolving nature of DM, the authors, each of whom are involved in specific applications of DM research, examined within a workshop environment emerging DM applications involving new production and supporting infrastructural technologies. This paper presents these generalizable findings on DM challenges and opportunities in terms of products, enabling production technologies, and the impact on the wider production and industrial system. Industry structure and location of activities are examined in terms of the democrat impact on participating network actors.The paper concludes with a discussion on the changing nature of manufacturing as a result of DM, from the traditional centralised, large scale, long lead-time forecast driven production operations, to a new DM paradigm where manufacturing is a decentralised, autonomous near end-user driven activity. A forward research agenda is proposed that considers the impact of DM on the industrial and urban landscape.
Shifting supply chains from linear to closed-loop models is an important step towards circular economy. This paper investigates business model innovation for circular supply chains, and proposes that productservice systems (PSS) business models can enhance the circularity of supply chains through value creation in inner circles, circling long and cascading use circles. It adopts an exploratory case study method of a large Chinese manufacturing firm operating a traditional product-based business model and three types of PSS business models (i.e. product-, use-and result-oriented PSSs). The supply chain operations of the four distinct business models are analysed and their associated circularities are discussed. The findings show that business models akin to result-oriented PSS, have tighter and more efficient cycles of supply chain operations; which means, the repair, reuse and remanufacturing system is faster and the rate is higher. This research contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between business model innovation and supply chain circularity.
This paper is a first step to understand the role that a smart city with a distributed production system could have in changing the nature and form of supply chain design. Since the end of the Second World War most supply chain systems for manufactured products have been based on "scale economies" and "bigness"; in our paper we challenge this traditional view. Our fundamental research question is: how could a smart city production system change supply chain design? In answering this question we develop an integrative framework for understanding the interplay between smart city technological initiatives (big data analytics, the industrial internet of things) and distributed manufacturing on supply chain design.This framework illustrates synergies between manufacturing and integrative technologies within the smart city context and links with supply chain design.Considering that smart cities are based on the collaboration between firms, endusers and local stakeholders, we advance the present knowledge on production systems through case study findings at the product level. In the conclusion, we stress there is a need for future research to empirically develop our work further and measure (beyond the product level), the extent to which new production technologies such as distributed manufacturing, are indeed democratizing supply chain design and transforming manufacturing from "global production" to a future "city-oriented" social materiality.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.