COVID-19 Effects on Distributed Manufacturing

The disruptive event of the COVID-19 pandemic appearing in 2020 changed the rules of how international supply chains and businesses perform. The pandemic took most of the countries and organisations by surprise, with the tragic consequences of 203 million infections and almost 4,5 million deaths worldwide until August 2021. This paper deals with the consequences of the pandemic relating to international distributed manufacturing. Generally, the risks and challenges that arise in this crisis are manifold and range from immediate health risks, isolation risks to the disruptive changes in the supply chain and manufacturing setups. Resilience, redundancy, and flexibility are the main factors of robustness that play an important role in this 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).