Today’s complex global supply chains are poised to be dismantled

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Another take on the impact that 3D printing might have on the traditional manufacturing-based supply chain that exists today. This article, authored by a vice-president at IBM’s global business services unit, argues that today’s vast inter-continental supply chains will come to be replaced by smaller, localised supply chains dominated by “a new generation of manufacturing technologies such as 3D printing, intelligent assembly robotics and open-source hardware”, and gives us a new term for it: the software-defined supply chain.