Resilience in manufacturing enterprises – connecting resilience, factory flows and sustainability dimensions

Resilience is of high importance for manufacturing enterprises with regard to the increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous political, societal and economic environment. In the face of rapid technological advancements, shifting market demands, and unpredictable disruptions, manufacturing firms must possess the ability to adapt swiftly and effectively. Implementing resilience factors goes beyond traditional risk management and can enable enterprises to maintain operational capabilities even amidst challenging circumstances. However, implementing resilience factors can be connected to additional economic effort and lead to negative environmental impacts and might result in conflicting sustainability goals. This paper analyses the various resilience factors (e.g., flexibility, diversity, robustness, etc.) and their potential contributions to maintain the functionality of the four main factory flows of energy, material, information and personnel. Subsequently, the interconnections between the most relevant resilience factors and the sustainability dimensions (environmental, social and economic) are derived and applied in a case-study to a production system. The results provide a structured insight on the connection and conflicting goals of environmental and economic sustainability vs. resilience, highlight current research demands and can be used as decision support for companies to identify suitable resilience measures.