Supply chains in engineering and manufacturing lag ten years behind other industries. So says research by Lisa Harrington of lharrington group, who argues that engineering and manufacturing businesses must re-evaluate their approach to supply chain management and respond to their industry's driving trends to remain competitive in today's volatile business environment.

Over the past several decades, processes to design and build cars, airplanes and products used in various other industries have typically followed a linear, sequential path. This process typically started with product research, ideation and concept development, followed by design and development, prototype and validation, leading to production, launch, operation and, eventually, product retirement.

Despite many underlying tensions, the Middle East has maintained a positive economic outlook, according to Frost & Sullivan's "International Supply Chain Excellence Programme-Gulf Edition 2014." This is evident from the region's ability to maintain a positive growth rate when most economies globally have struggled to be above the red line.

The biggest engineering companies nowadays prefer to talk about "additive manufacturing" rather than "3D printing".

The 3D printing market is expected to quadruple over the next decade to $12bn, moving from its main use today of creating prototypes to the most complex of production parts, according to Lux Research.