Vieweg, S. (2021). Distributed manufacturing under pandemic conditions [Master Thesis, Technische Universität Wien]. reposiTUm. https://doi.org/10.34726/hss.2021.81428
The thriving globalization conditions fostered the emergence of distributed manufacturing over the past decades, covering almost all of the industries, regions, and economies. The international and complex network of manufacturers, sub-manufacturers, and integrated logistics companies organized the industrial throughput to an almost perfect extent. Nevertheless, the disruptive event of the COVID-19 pandemic appearing in 2020 changed the rules of the game. This pandemic took most of the countries and organisations by surprise, with the tragic consequences of 120 million infections and almost 3 million deaths worldwide until March 2021. This thesis starts off with a brief introduction of the history of distributed manufacturing and economic internationalization. Then, an overview of the various pandemics of the past centuries is presented, with special focus on their economic consequences. Special attention of the analysis is put on the challenges from the current COVID-19 pandemic. Generally, the risks and challenges that arise in this crisis are manifold and range from immediate health risks, isolation risks as well as disruptive changes in the supply chain and manufacturing setups. This thesis focusses on suggesting and analysing a broad range of mitigation action that can be implemented to meet, solve or ease them. Resilience, redundancy and flexibility are the factors of robustness that play an important role in crisis management. Building up robustness and resilience is proposed by applying corrective and preparative action for a wide range of production factors (people, material, processes, supply chain etc.) and a variety of risk classes (health, isolation, lockdown). In order to exemplify the approach, two case scenarios with corrective actions are analysed and presented. The thesis closes with an outlook on how the mitigation actions can tactically serve as a set of corrective and preventive actions in order to improve the economic position. Focus is given on how to prepare for future challenges by a strong emphasis on resilience and robustness of the supply and value chains in distributed manufacturing. h
