Supplying spare parts using AM technologies

In order to stay competitive in today's markets corporations are constantly searching for areas of improvement within their products and processes and the available technologies in order to be more efficient and produce products more cost effective. In addition companies try to create distinctions of their products to maintain and gain market share by offering superior products and services. This is not only true for first time parts but also increasingly important for secondary products. These secondary products also called spare parts and their management is becoming a production factor, which is gaining more and more importance. Manufacturers are required to provide spare parts pending on the type of spare parts (consumer products or industrial products) in varying quantities making it more complex for the manufactures to maintain these systems. This paper is presenting an alternative solution for the growing quantity of product types on the market requiring currently enormous warehouses to keep stock for spare parts, with corresponding high costs and complex logistics. This emerging problem is caused by the continuously decreasing product life time, decreasing time-to-market and increasing regulatory affairs. A solution is foreseen using Additive Manufacturing (AM) technology, enabling economically viable, one-off manufacturing on demand as well as a possibility to create new business models.