We went to the headquarter of PostNord to hear about their use of Additive Manufacturing, digital inventory and 3YOURMIND to reinvent their Supply Chain.

Reinventing the Supply Chain with Additive Manufacturing

PostNord is the leading postal supplier of the nordic region, but they are also one of the largest producers of white label goods and third party logistics services in the world. With this lens, PostNord Strålfors is looking at using 3D printing to provide digital inventories that will create a true logistics on-demand. They have a powerful automation and digital logistics network that they are connecting to 3D printing with 3YOURMIND.

Customer Spotlight: Postnord

Video Transcript of the Customer Spotlight PostNord

Tomas Lundström: I'm the head of 3D. I've been working at PostNord for 12 years now in the subsidiary called "Strålfors". Today, PostNord is handling already warehousing for companies. We call it third party logistics, where we handle everything in their inventory. That really gives us the insight of how many products are on shelf that are not needed.

Mats Lindgren: You have a lot of slow movers or you have parts that aren't actually produced in a way to be cheap to buy, but they're actually expensive to maintain or transport.

Tomas Lundström: So we are building an automated distributed manufacturing solution, reducing the product down to just the data file and all the configuration with the data file.

Isabelle Baumann: Instead of having those huge inventories in the warehouse, spare parts, they will be there forever and be on hand whenever you need it on demand printing to be able to have a real automation of digital inventory.

Tomas Lundström: So when you just want your piece, or product, you guys go online and you press buy. We partnered up with 3YOURMIND for example.
They're really stable platform to build on. So for example, if you're a customer, you go into our portal, you will get instant quotation. When you upload your file, you will get the instant delivery time. We can automatically decide where the prints should be happening, which drop off place the truck will leave the product.  We use our own payment system called the Nordic online payment system, integrated to the 3YOURMIND software. Manufacturers today they need to change the way they think. They cannot be the centralized manufacturing facility for everything. They need to be able to distribute digital content to local producers. The companies that have not prepared for the scalability, they will be outrun by the automation and the already prepared processes. 

Samuel Stenberg: For this digital inventory you really have the ability to free up cash, which is from the CFO point of view one of the key struggles you have hardly free up cash. 

Pontus Gellerbrink: The 3YOURMIND software gives us the potential to be a cutting edge company to deliver products in time, that lead time. 

Tomas Lundström: If we can shorten lead times, we can shorten the stock inventory. We can shorten anything in the supply chain or reduce that to just one click, produce, delivery, in the same line, and we've cut a majority of the supply chain away.
To reinvent the supply chain. It's not an easy thing, but that's what we work with. To shape, the way that we are doing business with companies now, and for the future.