Manufacturing-as-a-Service (MaaS): state-of-the-art of up and running solutions and a framework to assess the level of development of a Cloud Manufacturing platform

During the last decades manufacturers tried to find new sources of flexibility because of the uncertainty of the market. Both practitioners and academics started to study new paradigms aiming to make companies more flexible up and downstream of their value chains leveraging on suppliers and customers. Cloud Manufacturing (CM) is certainly one of the most interesting concepts because it comes from the success of Cloud Computing and belongs to the complex fourth industrial revolution (i.e. Industry 4.0 paradigm). It has been introduced in 2010, defined as the “manufacturing version of cloud computing” where manufacturing resources are available to users on-demand, with outstanding flexibility. CM pursues the idea of creating Manufacturing as-a-Service (MaaS) leveraging on the benefits of the platform economy. In spite of its interest, after ten years debate there is not consensus on the essential characteristics of this paradigm because of the very limited number of real applications (prototypes excluded). In this paper we explore 6 cases of up and running platforms which resemble some of the characteristics of CM, define them as “CM Early adopters” and inductively propose a framework to assess the level of development of a CM platform. This study contributes to theory as it shows that CM is already arising in some businesses, the approach to the paradigm can vary significantly from one case to another, and different levels of development can be assessed. From a managerial point of view, this paper helps to understand the CM paradigm as it shows concrete examples of real companies pursuing the MaaS idea. In conclusion, MaaS seems ready to land on some industrial sectors and this can be either a new opportunity for competitiveness or a serious threat.