Additive Manufacturing in Inventory Management

Increasingly, the problems of space limitation and resources in the industrial and corporative environment have been discussed.

However, what if there was a way of reducing these two issues at once? The additive manufacturing can be your industry’s biggest ally in reaching this goal.

What is Additive Manufacturing?

The additive manufacturing is a production model where objects are made through 3D printing, projected from computational models. It receives the additive name because it prints products from the addition of layers of materials and, those materials could be ceramics, plastics, metals, polymeric filaments or resins.

Advantages of Additive Manufacturing

The additive manufacturing presents a series of advantages, specially to small and medium size industries, which possess budget and physical space of inventory limitation. Some of the advantages in adopting this production model are:

Cost Reduction: by only having pieces produced when necessary, the material and operation costs are reduced.

Rapidity: by having a computational model, the prototype execution becomes faster, the same way as the correction of defects in the project.

Complexity: The printing allows the manufacturing of pieces with more complex geometry, ensuring a precious and innovative design to your products.

Sustainability: the reduction of feedstock implies on the reduction of residue volume and waste of electrical energy in manufacturing.

Additive Manufacturing and Lean Manufacturing

The additive manufacturing can collaborate to a leaner production process, inspired on the lean manufacturing model, once that the 3D printing of pieces on demand decreases the quantity of resources employed in the operation and contributes to the reduction of inventory spaces.

The Lean Manufacturing, is a production methodology that values the reduction of processes, resources and waste. The aim of this methodology is to eliminate everything that requires time investment and excessive resources that don not add value to the product.

One of the pillars of lean manufacturing is the production model Just in Time, which produces the necessary product quantity only, without generating inventory leftovers.

The Additive Manufacturing in the Industrial Maintenance

In the industrial maintenance context, the additive manufacturing can be applied in the piece printing which will contribute to greater agility in the corrective maintenance processes, decreasing the cost of non-programmed stops.

Ensuring a fast production of substitution pieces could be the solution to a more efficient inventory management. After all, the reduction of physical space necessary to shelter the inventory significantly collaborates in the operation cost reduction of your industry.

Through the industry 4.0 tools, as the remote sensing, it is also possible to invest in another maintenance techniques, as for example, the predictive maintenance which contributes on the implantation of a leaner manufacturing, once that, trusting predictive techniques as the vibration and temperature analysis of industrial equipment, the incidence of corrective actions that demand spare parts in inventory decreases.

The Dynamox Solution can contribute to the maintenance plan of your industry through its advanced analysis and remote sensing system. Click here for a quotation.