Personal Fabrication as an Operational Strategy: Value of Delegating Production to Customer

Sethuraman, Nagarajan; Parlaktürk, Ali K.; Swaminathan, Jayashankar M.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3170011

Cited by 16 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Dong et al (2016) examine the impact of flexibility economics on assortment planning (i.e., which product variants to offer), and they find that, compared with traditional flexible production technologies with variable capacity cost that grows in product variety, the adoption of AM, with variable capacity cost that is invariant to variety, leads the firm to provide more variety. Sethuraman et al (2018) explore the personal fabrication potential of AM in the context of a monopolist firm that sells a product design to customers who can then use AM to produce the product at a quality of their choosing.…”

Section: Additive Manufacturingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Industry 4.0: Opportunities and Challenges for Operations Management

Olsen

Tomlin

2020

M&SOM

453

212

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Industry 4.0 connotes a new industrial revolution centered around cyber-physical systems. It posits that the real-time connection of physical and digital systems, along with new enabling technologies, will change the way that work is done and therefore, how work should be managed. It has the potential to break, or at least change, the traditional operations trade-offs among the competitive priorities of cost, flexibility, speed, and quality. This article describes the technologies inherent in Industry 4.0 and the opportunities and challenges for research in this area. The focus is on goods-producing industries, which includes both the manufacturing and agricultural sectors. Specific technologies discussed include additive manufacturing, the internet of things, blockchain, advanced robotics, and artificial intelligence.

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Section: Additive Manufacturingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Industry 4.0: Opportunities and Challenges for Operations Management

Olsen

Tomlin

2020

M&SOM

453

212

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“…A growing body of literature develops analytical models to evaluate the impact of AM vs. conventional manufacturing systems on operations management (Westerweel et al, 2018b, a;Sethuraman et al, 2018;Song and Zhang, 2020;Dong et al, 2020;Chen et al, 2020). Early works in this field focused primarily on spare part logistics (Westerweel et al, 2018a;Song and Zhang, 2020), consumer goods retailing (Chen et al, 2020), component design cost analysis (Westerweel et al, 2018b), and assortment planning (Dong et al, 2020).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Utilizing additive manufacturing and mass customization under capacity constraints

2022

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Additive manufacturing (AM), originally used for prototyping, is increasingly adopted for custom final part production across different industries. However, printing speed and production volume are two barriers for the adoption of AM for product customization at large scale. Nevertheless, manufacturers could aim to combine the benefits of AM for product customization with traditional mass customization (MC) technologies over the product life cycle (PLC). This approach is showcased in our paper as a manufacturing opportunity and is addressed via a non convex-concave optimization model that considers a monopolist manufacturer producing horizontally differentiated products at scale. To satisfy individual customer preferences under capacity considerations, the firm jointly decides on the inventory, production quantity, product variety, optimal technology-switching times (between AM and MC) and pricing strategy. Our approach can be implemented by decision-makers to leverage customer-centricity and benefit from this novel hybrid manufacturing practice. By deriving a closed-form solution for the production quantity based on an adaptive inventory policy, the resulting optimization problem is solved using the Sample Average Approximation framework grounded by analytical results. Our results demonstrate that the new usage of AM with MC can benefit a manufacturer for customer-centric driven strategies. Significant profit improvements can be achieved with an AM–MC–AM technology-switching scenario under certain capacity conditions and with an increasing-decreasing pricing strategy. Our results also indicate that the benefits of pricing flexibility are highest when capacity is unlimited or when the firm does not hold inventory. Under capacity constraints, a simple decreasing pricing policy combined with inventory performs very well.

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“…Song and Zhang (2020) consider a single location, multiple item spare parts inventory system which is partitioned into a set of parts that is printed on-demand with a capacitated on-site printer, and a set that is procured to stock from an overseas regular source. Sethuraman et al (2018) assess the value of personal fabrication, by which a firm sells the design for a consumer product and delegates production to the customer who is thus able to select her preferred quality level. Chen et al (2017) consider a manufacturer who operates a retail store that is supplied with traditionally manufactured products in build-to-stock fashion, as well as an on-line sales channel with customized, build-to-order printed products.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Sethuraman et al. (2018) assess the value of personal fabrication, by which a firm sells the design for a consumer product and delegates production to the customer who is thus able to select her preferred quality level. Chen et al.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Printing Spare Parts at Remote Locations: Fulfilling the Promise of Additive Manufacturing

Westerweel

Basten

Boer

et al. 2021

Production and Operations Management

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W e investigate the benefits of on-site printing at remote geographic locations, where access to spare parts is intermittent and supplies are replenished at fixed intervals. Organizations typically have no solution to spare parts shortages other than expensive expediting orders, or waiting for a part to arrive with the next replenishment. We investigate whether on-site three-dimensional (3D) printing of spare parts can bring relief. Our work extends dual-sourcing literature with fixed order cycles by considering two emergency supply options: expediting regular parts and 3D printing lower quality parts. We model the replenishment and emergency supply decisions as a Markov decision process and find that the optimal inventory control policy consists of two thresholds that control when to expedite, when to print and when to wait for regular parts via the next replenishment. We apply our model to a case study of the Royal Netherlands Army (RNLA) for her United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali. Our results show that on-site 3D printing, much more so than expediting, leads to large operational cost savings through on-site inventory reductions and increased asset availability, thus increasing the ability of the RNLA to operate in remote locations. These results extend to many other organizations that operate in remote locations, for example, those in the mining and offshore industry.

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Personal Fabrication as an Operational Strategy: Value of Delegating Production to Customer

Cited by 16 publications

References 28 publications

Industry 4.0: Opportunities and Challenges for Operations Management

Industry 4.0: Opportunities and Challenges for Operations Management

Utilizing additive manufacturing and mass customization under capacity constraints

Printing Spare Parts at Remote Locations: Fulfilling the Promise of Additive Manufacturing

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