Abstract
The tool-less manufacturing of lot-size one components by means of Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) can enable companies to enhance their manufacturing flexibility. Especially in the case of high variety manufacturing, companies adopting SLS can potentially reduce order lead times and manufacturing costs. This paper introduces a methodology suitable to assess different manufacturing strategies for high variety component families and leverages a case study from a global manufacturer of packaging machines to show the implications of AM adoption. The case study quantifies the reduction of both manufacturing costs and order lead time in the case of a component with a large amount of possible variants. In the case study, two possible operational strategies for the manufacturing of such with SLS are identified. In a first strategy, SLS adoption can be focused on optimising the specific volume-unit operating cost for producing all component variants, and thus obtain a total manufacturing cost reduction of up to \(17\%\) compared to the current conventional set-up. As a second strategy, SLS can be employed for the improvement of service quality. By focusing on the reduction of order lead times over the whole component family, this can be reduced by \(48\%\) compared the incumbent set-up. The trade-off among the two strategies is explained with the introduced concept of aggregated lot size.
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An EOS Formiga P110 was used as a reference system for capacity utilization calculations.
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Fontana, F., Marinelli, E., Meboldt, M. (2018). Selection of High-Variety Components for Selective Laser Sintering: An Industrial Case Study. In: Meboldt, M., Klahn, C. (eds) Industrializing Additive Manufacturing - Proceedings of Additive Manufacturing in Products and Applications - AMPA2017. AMPA 2017. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66866-6_23
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