ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING IMPETUS

Are you sitting at home reading this? A lot of you will be, having been compelled to work in this safer environment rather than your usual workplace. As part of this new experience it’s a fairly safe bet to assume that the majority of you will have drawn much more heavily on digital resources and extended your skill base accordingly.

Digital tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Hangouts Meet from Google have rapidly become established as everyday business tools with this further accelerated by measures such as those recently introduced by Google whereby it is now providing free access to advanced features of Hangouts Meet for designated user categories.

Effectively COVID-19 is a major stimulant to I.T. capacity building plus it is sparking a wave of innovation in the digital world aimed at providing both general and specialised solutions. One strong indicator of this is at European Union (EU) level where it is backing the European Digital SME Alliance, which represents about 20,000 SMEs across the EU, and is literally cataloguing numerous digital solutions for business as well as promoting broad-based innovation.

Looking at supply chains, for example, the Alliance is focusing attention on the very interesting subject of Additive Manufacturing. It notes: “Traditional supply chains are the basis of physical products. They are cumbersome, expensive, polluting, and inhibit fast-paced innovation. Products get sent around the world for different steps in their assembly and value chain.

“Digital products, on the other hand, have completely different value chains. They are ethereal, almost infinitely scalable, and can innovate at the speed of human imagination.

“With the advent of additive manufacturing, i.e. 3D-printers and automated factories, a third category of products is possible: digital-physical products (DPPs). These are products which are designed virtually throughout the supply- and value chains and only become physical in the last steps of the process.”

The potential revolutionary consequences of Additive Manufacturing are plain to see and COVID-19 is without doubt now a major force behind the increasing efforts to bring this new approach to the market at scale and with highly competitive cost features.

It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that COVID-19 may ultimately become recognised as a primary catalyst to building a new generation of supply chain offering much greater reliability and efficiency overall!