Improving the On-Demand Manufacturing Using Supply Chain Safeguards in Prototyping

Abstract

Supply chain is a set of interrelated activities working together to produce goods and services to the customers. For the entities in the supply chain to be competitive in the market they must have the strategies to deliver products on time. Therefore, strategies to safeguard supply chain are needed as to increase the efficiency of the supply chain and improve the speed of delivering the products to the market on the basis of on-demand manufacturing. The on-demand manufacturing will help to reduce the risk from the inventory cost. It will also make the company more responsive to the market demand that will bring a competitive advantage to the company. The supply chain safeguards can be done along the whole product development life cycle, however, in this project we are focusing on the area of prototyping stage and how it contributes in the supply chain safeguards. Rapid prototyping was commonly used among the additive manufacturing (AM) and it is the process of creating a model for the product in order to test it and find the defects associated with it before initiating the production. However, among additive manufacturing techniques many methods such as Stereolithography (SLA), Selective Laser Sintering (SLS), Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM), Rapid Prototyping (RP) and Direct Digital Manufacturing (DDM) just to name few among others.