Requirements of Information Systems in Product Development and production regarding additive manufacturing - a Quantitative Exploration

Additive Manufacturing differs in some characteristics from conventional manufacturing techniques. The core of additive techniques is a manufacturing process building up parts layer by layer. Furthermore, it is possible to include functionality into monolithic parts, which are built up within one process without the need of assembly. The research objective of this paper is the identification of requirements that are induced by Additive Manufacturing, for Information Systems in the product development and the production phase. This interdisciplinary research field is less considered by Information Systems researchers yet. Therefore, an explorative quantitative study, based on assumptions, is chosen as an adequate research method to reach that objective. As a result, a conceptual approach for an improved exchange of product data is presented. This concept mainly addresses the request of enterprises to satisfy the information demand in different industrial business processes. The following main requirements could be identified: improvement of Information Systems for customer participation in industrial Additive Manufacturing fields; determination of all product defining data into Additive Manufacturing product development phase; standardized, bidirectional data exchange between production and product development in context of Additive Manufacturing enterprises.