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Panalpina, Cardiff University to research 3D printing, manufacturing

SWISS forwarding giant Panalpina along with the Cardiff Business School and the Cardiff School of Engineering at Cardiff University are expanding their research to include new manufacturing technologies such as 3D printing.

The aim is to help Panalpina customers identify the right products that could be switched from traditional to new, additive manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing.

"The findings of this exciting new project will find their way into our wider offering of logistics manufacturing services which has already successfully transformed the manufacturing and logistics strategy of important Panalpina high-tech customers," said Panalpina global logistics chief Mike Wilson.

Their first research and development project that set out three years ago to search for the 'hidden formula" for lean inventories led to the company launching 'Demand-Driven Inventory Dispositioning" (D2ID), a new inventory forecasting application.

"We now have a new application at hand that allows us to forecast the demand of a company's products and plan its inventory accordingly," said lead researcher Nicole Ayiomamitou.

"To achieve this, we have taken real inventory data from Panalpina and developed a unique product life cycle algorithm based on leading-edge mathematical thinking."

"We started off by mapping the inventories of our customers across product life-cycles. The more data we analysed, the more refined we could make our inventory forecasting model," Mr Wilson said.

"We've now come to a point where we can accurately predict the points of inflection of inventories for all kinds of products across different industries. Based on that, we can estimate the maximum and minimum inventory holding for our customers."

The benefit of this approach for Panalpina is that it can then predict how much space is needed at its facilities, where to position the facilities and what services to offer.