resilience

Unforeseen events are increasingly challenging manufacturing companies. Being resilient during crises is becoming a key competence. Serious games (SG) can help make resilience-building processes more transparent. This article derives specific requirements for SG from different phases of resilience and shows how these can be implemented in game mechanics in order to effectively support the training of resilience.

The blockage of the Suez Canal in 2021, caused by the accident involving the container ship Ever Given, clearly illustrates the need to design global supply chains in such a way that they can respond quickly to disruptions. In a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, conventional logistics processes that focus on efficiency, and supply chain management methods in particular, are increasingly reaching their limits. Resilience, achieved through a combination of robustness and agility, is essential to ensure responsiveness. This article analyzes how risk management information systems (RMIS) can increase resilience. The analysis covers data availability, data transparency, modeling and simulation of risk scenarios, and the development of appropriate emergency action plans. Despite existing challenges in designing IT infrastructure, the measures mentioned have the potential to increase resilience in logistics.

Manufacturing companies incorporate reverse logistics as a building block of the circular economy for greater sustainability. Case studies show that this can result in strategic opportunities. This article summarizes an analysis of expert interviews on the increase in supply chain resilience attributed to reverse logistics. Potential benefits are highlighted, and companies are encouraged to examine the approach and implement innovative solutions. The result is a hypothesis-based value model that serves as an orientation aid for decision-makers.

Digital transformation processes have a high tendency for delay, exceeding costs, and failure. This poses a significant risk in competitive global markets and shifting business models of entire industries. Successful companies have a different approach to new technologies than more traditional incumbents. Including the workforce in the transformation via change leadership in a digital transformation coaching process can reduce fear and resistance and can lead to a paradigm shift of approaching the digital transformation itself: as an agility driven, infinite game with high potential gain.

More than 99% of German companies are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which therefore represent an important part of industrial supply chains. New regulations are increasing the pressure on companies to create transparency along the supply chain so that the role of SMEs is also coming into focus. However, they are often confronted with limited financial and human resources. Based on a quantitative survey and a literature review, this article deals with the question of what SME-friendly approaches could look like.

The supply of CRM to domestic companies is threatened by disruptions (e. g. trade conflicts or shortages). Relocating production to stable regions is often not possible in the context of CRM due to geological reasons. One way out is CE. From a network perspective, the resilience must be improved and expanded to include viability. In CE for resilience improvement, a distinction must be made between ex-post and ex-ante CE. Ex-post CE is used as a reaction to a disruption and ex-ante CE reduces the probability of a disruption occurring.