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For more than ten years, the value of additive manufacturing (AM) for after-sales service logistics has been propagated. Today, however, only few applications are observed in practice. The purpose of this paper is to discuss possible reasons for this discrepancy and to develop a method to simplify the identification of economically valuable and technologically feasible business cases.

The approach is based on the analytic hierarchy process and relies on spare part information, that is easily retrievable from the company databases. This has two advantages: first, the approach can be customized toward specific company characteristics, and second, a very large number of spare parts may be assessed simultaneously. A field study is discussed in order to demonstrate and validate the approach in practice. Furthermore, sensitivity analyses are performed to evaluate the robustness …