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Comments on 3D Printing: The End Of Global Supply Chains?
'Nanofax AG offers a technology that digitally reproduces objects, physically, at a distance.'- William Gibson, 1999. (Read the complete story)

"Here are some additional tidbits from the Manners-Bell and Lyon report:
  • “A proportion of goods which were previously produced in China or other Asia markets could be ‘near-sourced’ to North America and Europe. This would reduce shipping and air cargo volumes.”
  • “The ‘mass customization’ of products would mean that inventory levels fall, as goods are made to order. This would have the effect of reducing warehousing requirements.”
  • “As manufacturing processes are increasingly re-bundled within a single facility, tiers of component suppliers are done away with, as is the need for supplier villages, line side supply etc.”
  • “Build-to-order production strategies could fundamentally impact the manufacturer-wholesaler-retailer relationship. In the future the shopping experience could also be vastly different. In some sectors, retailers will either cease to exist or become ‘shop windows’ for manufacturers, keeping no stock of their own. Orders are fulfilled directly by the manufacturer, and delivered to the home of the consumer.”
  • “A major new sector of the logistics industry would emerge dealing with the storage and movement of the raw materials which ‘feed’ the 3D printers. As 3D printers become more affordable to the general public, the home delivery market of these materials would increase.”
  • Global and national parts warehouses as well as forward stock locations will become unnecessary. “At present billions are spent on holding stock to supply products as diverse as cars to x-ray machines. In some cases huge amount of redundancy is built into supply chains to enable parts to be dispatched in a very short timescale to get machines up and running again as fast as possible. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand the benefits for a service parts engineer of being able to download a part design from an online library, 3D print it and then fit it within a very short time window.”
"
(Bill Christensen 10/14/2012 6:12:01 PM)

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