The impact of Additive Manufacturing Adoption on Supply Chain Complexity and Uncertainty: A Literature review

Purpose: This dissertation aims to conduct an overview research regarding the topic of Additive Manufacturing adoption along with the identification of impacts of such adoption to the supply chain complexity and uncertainty. Throughout the dissertation, the areas of interests and research trend have been investigated while also identified the gaps within the pool of literature to provide recommendations for future directions of AM adoption research. Methodology: Seventy-eight papers were collected by selecting papers from journals ranked one to four stars based on Association of Business Schools (ABS). The analysis was conducted using content analysis, citation analysis, and simple moving average. Cognitive mapping was used to provide a summary of the researcher’s discussions and analyses. Findings: In total, there are four main findings that have been identified within this dissertation, which are: - Identified research categories: “Background Information about AM”, “Impacts of AM Adoption”, “Factors Leading to AM Adoption”, “Approaches of AM Adoption” and “Techniques to Improve AM Adoption”. - The trend of research: An increase in the number of published papers per year and in the number of citations per time period of 4 years have been found under the topic of AM adoption. - Impacts on supply chain complexity and uncertainty: All of the impacts of AM adoption have found to reduce the level of supply chain complexity. For supply chain uncertainty, only upstream uncertainty is found to be reduced while both of the downstream and internal manufacturing uncertainty are analyzed to enlarge as a result of AM utilization. - Gaps in the literature: Categories of “Background Information about AM”, “Factors Leading to AM Adoption”, “Approaches of AM Adoption” and “Techniques to Improve AM Adoption”; multi-process adoption for AM; practical examples and cases. Value: No comprehensive research was done to explore the adoption of Additive Manufacturing and the impacts of such adoption on the supply chain complexity and uncertainty level