Resilience is commonly addressed at the level of individual companies. Still, in business ecosystems it is also important to address resilience from a network perspective. Regarding the scope of Eur3ka, we focus on resilience in the domain of manufacturing networks in the healthcare sector.
Together with Eur3ka partners (TNO and Brainport Industries) we are organising a workshop about resilience in manufacturing networks.
In business networks resilience is defined as the capacity to handle/absorb disturbances and be able to reorganize so as to retain essentially the same function and thereby maintain the identity of the network. It is the ability to cope with shocks and keep functioning in much the same kind of way. [3]
Industry 4.0 positions manufacturing networks as the preeminent driver of economic growth [4]. However, as we saw recently in the COVID-19 pandemic, that growth could still not prevent that organisations were heavily affected by the effects of the crisis. Without governmental support, the multilevel attack on individual resources, personnel and logistics would have wiped out many organisations. Organisations themselves showed insufficient capacity on the levelof re-planning, re-scheduling and re-organization. The crisis threatened individual organisations and disrupted manufacturing networks. Recent reports [1][2] show that, although the formation of business ecosystems might strengthen organisations in their daily business, they still seem to be vulnerable to external shocks.
”During the pandemic we saw a sudden and extreme increase of demand for medical supplies and equipment. Whilst the virus rapidly spread across coun-tries and regions, causing a huge impact on people’s lives, it became painfullyvisible that there was a shortage of critical supplies and equipment. Depleted stockpiles, and chaotic market behaviour in demand and supply were the result.” (Eur3ka) This has led to an increased attention for resiliency and forced organizations to rethink both at an individual level as well as on a network level.
The workshop puts the Eur3ka project on stage. A first trial will be held on sept 20th for a local Dutch audience. For more information please contact wico.mulder@tno.nl or mike.deroode@tno.nl.
References
[1] Lund, S., Manyika, J., Woetzel, J, Barriball, E., Krishnan, M., Al-icke, K., Birshan, W., George K., Smit, S., Swan, D., HutzlerK, Risk, resilience, and rebalancing in global value chains, august 2020 // report,https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/risk-resilience-and-rebalancing-in-global-value-chains
[2] Diedrich, D., Northcote, N., Roder, T., Sauer-Sidor, K., Strate-gic resilience during the COVID-19 crisis,march 2021 // article,https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/strategic-resilience-during-the-covid-19-crisis
[3] Book: “Resilience Practice- Building Capacity to Absorb Disturbance and Maintain Function” – Walker & Salt, 2012, www.resalliance.org
[4] Hermann, M., Pentek, T., Otto, B. Design principles for industrie 4.0 scenar-ios. In Proceedings of the 49th Hawaii international conference on systemsciences (HICSS), Koloa, HI, USA, 5–8 January 2016; IEEE: Piscataway,NJ, USA, 2016; pp. 3928–3937.