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

Abstract

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.

Optimum Laser Polishing Decision-Making for On-Demand Additive Manufacturing of Spare Parts: An Exploratory Study

“…Recently, additive manufacturing, specifically 3D printing, is shown to be quite beneficial for spare parts inventory control as it allows on-demand production of spare parts instead of ordering them to OPS [9]. Since such orders are usually delivered after a positive lead time, maintenance companies have to hold spare parts inventory in order to avoid long downtimes of capital products which might lead to loss of customers or failure to satisfy service commitments.…”

“…> 0, > 1) for the state space ( ̅ , , 0 , ̅ ). This decomposition of the state space is also utilized by Westerweel et al [9].…”

Additive Manufacturing and Maritime Spare Parts: Benefits and Obstacles for the End-Users

“…Meanwhile, as the supply of spare parts is important for vessel maintenance, shipping can learn from studies in other industries. The main positive effects of the application of AM in the SPSC in the area of moving assets stated by authors in the literature are (Table 1) asset availability [19], economic efficiency [17,20], reduced inventory [16,18,29], improved service [15,18,29], lead time reduction [22], better supply chain performance [21] and decreasing carbon emissions [17,18]. Company objectives lead company decisions and concentrate efforts in obtaining them.…”

“…The spare parts supply chain with the introduction of AM has attracted the interest of a number of researchers. Most of the studies cover the following industries: aerospace/aviation [15][16][17][18][19], marine and offshore [16,20], automotive [21,22], mechanical engineering [17] and medical [17,23]. The reason for the interest in this particular supply chain is that spare parts differ from consumer products in terms of demand (i.e., sporadic and difficult to predict) [24][25][26] and in many cases there are relatively limited historical demand data available [27].…”

Industry 4.0: Opportunities and Challenges for Operations Management

“…Song and Zhang (2018) model a hybrid multipart MRO system in which spare parts can be stocked or 3D printed on demand, and they find that the value of 3D printing is increasing in the part variety (as measured by the number of parts) and decreasing in the part criticality (as measured by the part's outage or backorder cost). Motivated by a Royal Netherlands Army peacekeeping mission and the fact that AMproduced parts in the field may be of lower quality, Westerweel et al (2018) explore a dual-sourcing service part system in which regular spare part orders can be filled after a lead time, but AM can be used to ondemand print temporary replacement parts. Knofius et al (2019) explore how the part consolidation potential of AM influences overall lifecycle costs when spare parts management is taken into account.…”