Resilience in value creation systems through additive manufacturing: a decision model

Due to increasing globalization and market volatility, value creation systems are becoming progressively vulnerable to unpredictable crises. Organizations are forced to design their processes more crisis-proof to secure their existence in the dynamic market environment. The ability to prepare for, respond to and recover from random disruptive events is described by the term resilience. One possible way to increase resilience of value creation systems is by adapting flexible technologies like additive manufacturing. Due to its multiple and broad ranging applications and characteristic potentials, additive manufacturing provides the ability to radically change the design of value creation systems. This paper proposes a decision model to assist organizations in improving their system resilience by integrating additive manufacturing processes into their value creation system. The Design Science Research Paradigm was adopted to align practical research with existing problems. The model follows a knowledge-based approach, for which a qualitative research study was designed and conducted to derive model requirements. Subsequently, the model was conceptually developed considering the identified requirements and validated on a laboratory scale.