Evaluation of technical and economic feasibility of additive manufacturing technology: Evidences from a case study

3D Printing has been firstly licensed in the far 1980 year by Charles Hull, the founder and (still) president of 3D Systems, which is a leading company in this sector. The technology has followed an incubation period of almost 25-30 years before becoming enough mature to propose a big spectrum of printing techniques, usable materials which allowed to cross the boundaries of traditional prototyping activities, fully soaking in the direct production of parts, components and final products. The main aim of this work is to test and validate an empirical guideline and tools thanks to which every manufacturing company can evaluate whether additive manufacturing (AM) applications could be suitable according to their specific context. Guidelines and tools, coming from a previous work developed by Pour et al. (2015), have been properly updated and integrated, thanks to a new application in a case study involving a large enterprise, belonging to the textile machinery sector.