Technology Integration into Existing Companies

Theimplementation of additive manufacturing as an industrial manufacturing process poses extraordinary challenges to companies due to their far-reaching differences to conventional processes. In addition to the major differences in the production process, the pre and post process steps in particular also require a rethinking for companies and their employees. To overcome these challenges and specifically to assist SMEs in the integration of technologies five industrial companies are researching together within research project "OptiAMix", funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and coordinated by the Paderborn University. This paper focuses on the development of an optimal and standardized process chain and its implementation in a general integration methodology. This enables the standardized integration of additivemanufacturing in order to create a uniform understanding of the procedures and tasks within the company for the industrial application of additive manufacturing at an early stage as well as the full exploitation of its high potentials. Therefore, the methodology also includes other technology-specific components such as strategic component selection, decision support for "make or buy" and the implementation of automated component marking.