Application and environmental implications of Lean Manufacturing and metal-Additive Manufacturing in automotive industry

The automotive industry represents a growing sector that has been massively evolved over the past decades. In fact, the continuing challenges have been driven carmakers all over the world toward a product and process improvement bringing the vehicles’ manufactures the best in terms of innovations and technologies utilization. By means of literature synthesis, we build an overview of the history of the automotive industry highlighting all the more relevant steps and focusing on the effect of the Lean Manufacturing on such companies. More than that, the study then proceeds in the definition and a deep consideration of the Additive Manufacturing technology as part of the latter evolutionary step. A final comparison allows to better understand the potentiality of this method versus the traditional manufacturing process in terms of environmental impact, productivity, and lead time by the considerations of real case studies took from both literature and McMaster Automotive Resource Centre (MARC). By applying a proper model for the evaluation of the energy demand and the carbon footprint of each component, it has been possible to compare CM and AM in three different levels. Material, Process and Use phase represent the considered steps for the comparison.