Mark Hartnett
Senior Technologist – Additive Manufacturing, Irish Manufacturing Research
Learn how additive manufacturing (AM) helps strengthen supply-chain resilience, reduce part costs and produce critical components closer to demand.
Customer expectations are shifting faster than ever. Product development cycles are shortening, while demand for more personalised products continues to grow. This requires a greater level of responsiveness across the entire value chain. Traditional manufacturing, with its reliance on tooling and long ramp-up phases, cannot adapt quickly enough to support this pace of change.
Manufacturing is at a turning point
AM enables a fundamentally different approach. By moving directly from a digital design to a finished component, AM eliminates the need for tooling and complex scheduling. This allows manufacturers to pivot instantly to new designs or orders, cutting response times from weeks to days and creating a direct line between customer demand and product delivery.
Strengthening supply chain resilience
In recent years, manufacturers have faced repeated disruptions from wars, logistics blockages, pandemics and most feared of all, tariffs. These events have exposed the vulnerability of long, globally dispersed supply chains. AM offers a route to resilience by localising production and reducing dependence on external suppliers. Through design consolidation and reduced part counts, manufacturers can simplify their bills of materials and produce critical components closer to the point of use. The result is a more distributed, agile and secure manufacturing network that can adapt rapidly to global uncertainty.
AM delivers not just flexibility and precision, but measurable cost benefits
Maintaining precision and quality
Even as demand cycles accelerate, expectations for quality continue to rise. Today’s AM technologies deliver the precision and reliability required for high-performance applications, commonly rivalling injection moulding. Combined with new material developments, including regulated polymers for food-contact and medical environments, the barriers for industrial adoption of AM are fading.
Competitive advantage through simplification
For the right components, AM delivers not just flexibility and precision, but measurable cost benefits. By removing multiple production stages and minimising work-in-progress, part costs can fall significantly. This creates a powerful combination of agility, quality and economy, with additive production as a cornerstone of the next generation of Irish manufacturing.
