
Improving the Supply Resilience with AM and Digital Inventories
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The traditional supply chain is under pressure. The Energy industry faces several challenges in sourcing the required spare parts for safe and efficient operation. One challenge is obsolete spare parts for old equipment, another is logistical challenges due to pandemic, war or supply routes being blocked. Additive Manufacturing is a fully automatic production method, which starts with a 3D model and builds a component layer by layer. The complexity factor of AM makes it possible to produce components with highly improved functionality and properties. AM is extremely flexible and perfectly suited for on-demand manufacturing. Global Digital Supply Network are being tested in the Energy Industry, connecting the required ecosystem, storing the digital recipes, enabling a market place for digital parts combined with on-demand manufacturing, like AM. This will reduce the lead time and solve many of the supply chain challenges. The combination of Additive Manufacturing and Digital Supply Network has already proven to improve the supply speed and resilience, in addition there have been shown improvements within sustainability, cost efficiency and local value creation. One of the main value drivers is the reduced lead time. Every year the Energy Industry experience a reduced production efficiency due to technical problems and long lead time for spare parts. This amounts to billions of USD. Lack of parts or long lead time of spare parts is also a major cost driver within maintenance. By intruducing DSN and local on-demand manufacturing we can mitigate these losses. n Equinor the physical warehouses contain approximately 3bn USD worth of equipment. 80% of these parts will never be used. That is a big amount of waste.