Exploring the role of Manufacturing-as-a-Service for improving Supply Chain Resilience

Supply chain resilience (SCR) has been a key focus for researchers and businesses over the past decade. The Covid-19 intensified this attention, highlighting critical issues such as raw material shortages, unpredictable demand shifts, and logistics and supply chain challenges. These disruptions have significantly impacted global supply chains in the last two years. Manufacturing-as-a-Service (MaaS) has emerged as a new service-oriented manufacturing paradigm inspired by cloud manufacturing. MaaS has the potential to support companies in increasing their SCR, e.g., by providing access to a wide pool of suppliers. However, literature is scarce in investigating this relationship. This paper aims to fill this gap through 15 expert interviews exploring the link between SCR capabilities and MaaS. Results suggest that MaaS supports supply chain flexibility, velocity, redundancy and visibility. For the experts, MaaS has a detrimental effect on supply chain collaboration, which is considered an antecedent of SCR for literature. Finally, the functionalities needed in a MaaS system to support SCR are discussed.