Distributed manufacturing and on-demand spare parts: why the entire sector is looking in that direction

In recent months, four institutions that don't coordinate with each other have said the same thing in different words: we need to be able to manufacture the same part, with the same guarantees, in different locations and when needed. NATO called it industrial resilience, the European Commission included it in its defense projects of common interest, ASTM is turning it into common qualification criteria, and an American manufacturer presented it as a product. The overlap is not accidental: it's the same problem viewed from four different perspectives.

The underlying problem

traditional supply chain relies on stockpiling. A thousand units of a spare part are manufactured, stored, and consumed over years. It works as long as consumption is predictable and the warehouse is where it's needed.

It stops working when any of these four things happen:

• The component is discontinued and the supplier no longer exists.
• Demand is unpredictable and the warehouse is either understocked or overstocked.
• What's needed is on the other side of the world and shipping takes weeks.
• The supplier is in a jurisdiction that is currently unfriendly.

All four have the same possible answer: do not store the part, store the file and the ability to manufacture it.

What does it take for that to be real?

This is where the idea gets tricky, and where it's best not to oversell it. Making a part look the same in Bilbao and Ankara requires four things, and only the first one has been resolved.

1. The same machine and the same parameters. Resolved if the fleet is homogeneous. If each shop floor has different equipment, no.

2. The same material, with the same traceability. The powder has a batch number, chemical composition, and number of reuse cycles. Without this record, there is no possible equivalence.

3. A common acceptance criterion. This is the real bottleneck. Currently, the qualification of an LPBF part is negotiated on a case-by-case basis between the manufacturer and the customer. The AAMI project, led by America Makes and the NCDMM with ASTM International, seeks precisely to establish common qualification criteria between the United States and the United Kingdom. The existence of this project indicates both that the problem matters and that it is not yet resolved.

4. Evidence that travels with the part. Parameters, powder batch, heat treatment, and passed controls. If this information is not included, the part is indistinguishable from any other.

Why this matters to us

Because it is exactly the model on which AdditiveDelivery is built, and it is worth explaining why we believe it can work at our scale.

Homogeneous fleet. The shop floors in the network manufacture with ALBA machines. It's not a platform that adds any equipment: it's the same technology in all nodes, with the same parameters.

Same price regardless of the source. The price is calculated by the price quoting tool plus an agreed-upon margin plus shipping. It is not auctioned. If the price depended on the shop floor, the promise of price equivalence would be false from day one.

Manufacturing report with each part. Parameters, powder batch, heat treatment, and controls. This is item 4 on the list above, and it's what turns "we received a part" into "we received a part that we can justify."

What we still don't have is point 3 in its strong version: a third-party recognized qualification criterion for critical parts. Nobody has it. When it exists, it will be due to work like ASTM's, not to a decision made by a single manufacturer.

What this is not

It's not about "printing any spare part anywhere." There are parts that shouldn't be manufactured by LPBF, and there are applications where qualification takes years, and rightly so, because if that part fails, something else falls apart.

It's something more modest and more useful: for a broad range of components—tooling, non-critical spares, short production runs, discontinued parts—it's now possible to manufacture locally, quickly, and with proven reliability. And that range is much larger than most companies realize, because they've never actually tested it.

In summary

The sector isn't moving towards distributed manufacturing because of fashion trends, but because the stockpiling model has failed in places where failure was unacceptable. The manufacturing technology already exists. What's lacking is an agreement on how to prove that a part manufactured here is the same as one manufactured there.

Meanwhile, the sensible thing to do is start with the parts where that agreement isn't necessary. If you have one in mind, the quote calculator will tell you in minutes whether it's worthwhile.

How to prove that the part manufactured here is the same as the one there, in how to qualify an LPBF part. And the full account of manufacturing nearby versus bringing from far away, in manufacture the spare part here or bring it.