Additive Manufacturing for Tetra Pak Parts Supply Chain

Abstract: Businesses today need to recognize that they have to be fast at realizing and exploiting new competitive advantages before the opportunity is lost. Instead of the traditional focus on price and quality, there is a shift towards the delivery of value to customers. This is strongly connected to the reduction of downtime of production and high reliability. Here the spare parts supply chain plays an important role and the use of additive manufacturing (AM) may give early adopters a head start. Tetra Pak is a company in the food packaging industry. They provide carton packaging for liquid food products and processing solutions for a broad range of products globally. Tetra Pak Part Supply Chain (PSC) sees high service level as its’ main competitive advantage. There are high costs related to this with their high number of different spare parts. For instance, Tetra Pak needs to keep critical parts in stock even if they are sold very seldom, to be able to supply their customers fast. Tetra Pak has realised that AM can have a big impact for them. This paper aims at determining how suitable AM is for Tetra Pak. The paper starts with a background about Tetra Pak and AM before a thorough literature review. It focuses on AM technologies and materials but also how the supply chain of companies like Tetra Pak will be affected by AM. A proof of concept of a few selected parts in plastic and metal has been performed to get a deeper understanding of AM’s applicability for Tetra Pak. Not only the quality of the parts but also aspects such as lead-time and cost were taken into consideration. The results of the proof of concept showed that AM is not able to replace Tetra Pak’s spare parts “out of the box” and meet the high requirements on surface finish that Tetra Pak demand. An alternative approach was developed where 3D printed parts will work as a temporary solution for express orders. These are for customers in urgent need of a spare part. To receive a temporary part faster outweighs the lower quality, as long as the food safety is not jeopardised. The lead-time for non-stocked express orders was one area with possible improvement. By using a temporary 3D printed part, the lead-time could be shortened to a maximum of two days.