Integrating additive manufacturing into operations at middle market companies

Ascent Aerospace's leadership recognizes the transformative potential of additive manufacturing (AM) to the aerospace tooling industry. As a middle market company, Ascent required a deliberate approach to identifying areas with the highest potential for value creation. Without the research and development budget of an aerospace OEM, the best path forward for Ascent is to leverage existing AM technologies and those requiring minimal further development. The motivation for this project is to identify the best path forward for Ascent in leveraging AM as a value creation tool. Ascent had no AM capability at the beginning of this project, using a supplier when AM components when specifically requested by a customer. The thesis describes a methodology and results for identifying where to integrate AM into operations. It discusses the data and analysis used to find impact areas. The thesis also addresses some of the barriers impacting the adoption of AM. The analytical methods and organizational factors for additive adoption provide a holistic view of how to integrate AM into regular operations. Abstracted away from the case studies, the method should be actionable at any capitally constrained company to generate value through the adoption of AM. Recommendations on future work on how to approach the adoption of AM will be discussed, along with specific future work related to the thesis.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Mangan, Thomas J.(Thomas James),IV

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• John Hart and John F. Carrier.

• Sloan School of Management.
• Mechanical Engineering.
• Leaders for Global Operations Program.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122572

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122572