Resilience: Demonstrating strength in the face of crises and unforeseeable events

Surprise! Crises and disruptive incidents often strike suddenly and unexpectedly. However, with well-thought-out strategies, companies can prepare themselves: good preparation creates room to maneuver in emergencies and helps maintain the ability to act during a crisis. This not only provides security and stability in challenging situations but can even offer opportunities in the form of disruptive innovations.

With strong and robust processes, you can approach important and sustainable decisions more calmly and confidently than many competitors even in times of crisis. This keeps your eyes open for new opportunities, even when turbulence hits.

Not all crises are unforeseeable, but their consequences often are. Recognizing what is happening early and responding quickly must therefore become part of day-to-day operations. Adaptive and dynamic processes that are regularly reviewed and adjusted can provide critical support here.

Together with our industrial partners, we develop customized approaches that cover all areas of the business. With the right strategies and processes, you can improve your ability to continuously adapt production and build a resilient company well prepared for disruption.

For example, we work with manufacturing companies to develop strategies that reduce supply chain dependencies and enable early detection of technologically relevant developments.

For the evolution of your production systems, we develop modular platforms that allow you to respond to changes, new conditions, and customer needs with agility and cost efficiency. By digitalizing and networking your systems and equipment, we help you enable self-regulation and self-correction key elements of a truly resilient operation.

Becoming resilient: here's how we proceed. Are you In?

Thinking ahead in business

To shape future-proof market and technology options, we reduce risk factors and disruptions: Develop with us preparatory and regenerative measures for disruptions and proactively identify all foreseeable risks, so you can operate securely and with foresight. This strengthens your company and enhances both resilience and profitability.

Producing autonomously and flexibly

We conduct research to give your production greater autonomy: With self-learning and independent systems, we enable you to save costs and reduce your business risks. Adaptive, connected production systems link several of your processes, allowing you to produce more efficiently. We not only automate but also teach your manufacturing systems to continuously optimize themselves and adapt to changing conditions. This allows you to respond flexibly and efficiently to disruptions while saving costs through increased productivity even under normal operating conditions. We reduce the risk of severe production errors by implementing adaptive process monitoring in near real-time.

Save development costs and time

With modular systems and standardized interfaces, you achieve flexibility in your company: By exchanging individual modules, systems, and components, you can respond more quickly to changes and adapt your production as soon as the market shifts. This allows you to continue producing cost-effectively without losing profitability. We develop the right systems for you with a wide range of customizable modules, ensuring that you remain flexible and efficient when your customers expect individual changes and adjustments to your products.

Improving resilience in the organization – Gaining crisis security

The future can be planned, but do you also have a Plan B? The more thoroughly you prepare in times of calm and the better you know your options, the less unforeseen events can affect you. And perhaps, as you move forward with us, you will develop future-proof ideas that will already take you further in the market than your competitors today.

 

7 steps for greater resilience

Are you facing the question of how to ensure your competitiveness in the American market as quickly as possible?

Disruptive technologies

How to win the market: Discover which new technologies you can use to replace existing products and conquer completely new markets.

Early technology detection

Technology scanning, scouting and monitoring help you to back the right horse in good time. This methodically strengthens your decision-making ability. 

 

Roadmapping

If you know the way, it is easier to reach your goal: Roadmapping helps you to plan your technology deployment step by step and to develop targeted solutions for risks and uncertainties.

 

Identify and act on risks

Risk management is entrepreneurial duty and life insurance in one, protects your company and promotes responsible action.

Production resilience

Strengthen your production with customized solutions for robustness and efficiency. Learn more about our services for optimizing your production environment.

More autonomous in production – through proactive and intelligent use of technology

Not only technologies are changing, but the labor market will also undergo significant transformation in the coming years. Flexibility and adaptability will be required at all levels, and adaptive, self-optimizing, and autonomous systems will shape production. We develop systems, modules, and plants that help prepare your company for an uncertain future.

5G in production

Efficient processes for higher productivity require flexible and adaptive systems and plants with powerful sensor and control technology.

 

Flexibility in production

With "COPE", we offer you a customized, adaptive control software that responds flexibly to quality changes during production.

 

Control processes remotely

In the research project "VITAMINE_5G," we are developing a virtual reality environment that allows manufacturing processes to be controlled from a safe distance.

Artificial intelligence in production

AI and Machine Learning create flexibility for your company, reduce manufacturing costs, and improve product quality.

Modular systems – upgrade and reconfigure quickly and efficiently

Development cycles are becoming shorter, customer demands more individual, and flexibility thus more important. Those who think in modules from the start and rely on standardized interfaces have an advantage. In the modular system, you can quickly find the right solution for your new task while preserving the value of existing machines and systems.

Plant construction in the shortest time

The coronavirus pandemic as a prototype of the crisis: In just five weeks, we built a functional prototype system for the production of MNS masks.

 

Modules for roll-to-roll manufacturing

Modular roll-to-roll systems make continuous manufacturing particularly cost-effective and flexible.

 

Automation against skills shortage

We automate routine tasks that previously required specialized personnel. This improves reproducibility, increases throughput, and relieves your workforce.

Systems and modules for precision assembly

For the automated assembly of optics and electronics, we develop and test custom plant prototypes and modules.

 

Successful resilience projects in collaboration with Fraunhofer IPT

Here you will find some examples of our resilience projects and results from the collaboration between industry and research, aimed at strengthening your resilience. If you would like to learn more about how your production can become more resilient to negative external influences, feel free to contact us!

When the market mollapses – shifting production to MNS Mask Manufacturing

© PantherMedia/Jasmin Merdan

Goal

In the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, the Fraunhofer IPT received a request from a medium-sized company to develop a prototype for production systems to manufacture MNS masks, which are in high demand.

Procedure and results

In the fight against the coronavirus, Moss GmbH took advantage of our many years of experience in production technology from research and industrial projects: In collaboration with IBF Automation GmbH, a production plant for MNS masks was to be developed and built.

With our expertise in the development of automation solutions and manufacturing processes for series production, we jointly built a fully automated prototype, which was then to be used for series production on an industrial scale. When planning and developing the mask production, we considered the entire supply chain and looked at the process from start to finish - from textile production to certification and supply chain management.

With this holistic approach, together with the companies involved, we were able to successfully convert the entire production within a few weeks during the crisis and at the same time make an important contribution to providing MNS masks “Made in Germany” at marketable prices.

Press release "Fraunhofer IPT, Moss und IBF Automation bauen Anlagen zur Fertigung von 50 000 MNS-Masken pro Tag" (German only)

Avoid production errors: VR for real-time process control in unsafe environments

© Fraunhofer IPT

Goal

The aim of the research project “VITAMINE_5G - Virtual Reality Environment for Additive Manufacturing enabled by 5G” is to make manufacturing processes more controllable, safer and more transparent with a digital virtual reality environment.

Procedure and results

The additive manufacturing process “laser metal deposition with wire”, or LMD-w for short, serves as a practical example of process control and monitoring away from the actual production facility.

Up to now, it has been difficult to monitor the LMD-w production process and errors are usually only detected after production. That is why we are working on a VR environment that can display the process in real time via 5G technology. This allows errors to be detected and corrected during the process or even avoided altogether.

To ensure that the laser processes can be monitored and controlled regardless of location, the researchers and our project partners defined the appropriate sensor technology for the system and integrated it into the robot cell in which the laser process was to take place. It is already clear that the results of the project will significantly improve process monitoring at LMD-w.

Research Project "Vitamine_5G"

Quickly retool production: Flexibly adapt systems, equipment and materials to new products

Wissenschaftlerin arbeitet mit einer Steuerungssoftware an einer automatisierten Laboranlage
© Fraunhofer IPT

Goal

Our goal is to make the control of automated processes and process sequences flexible and adaptable, even in complex and highly individualized production environments.

Procedure and results

Together with our partners, we are developing marketable software for flexible networking that replaces rigid process chains with freely interlinked processes. To ensure these free and adaptable processes, we use modern scientific approaches from Industry 4.0 and IIoT.

“COPE”, our adaptive control software, is used to efficiently automate production environments. It controls all processes and simultaneously monitors systems, devices and material usage. COPE uses a customizable scheduling algorithm to manage these resources. The COPE project team at the Fraunhofer IPT has thus developed software that can be individually adapted to customer requirements, react flexibly to changes and adapt process sequences directly and independently.

More about "Versatile Production Systems and Flexible Process Chains"

Our whitepapers: What resilience means in different industries

Different industries are confronted with very different risks and dangers in crisis situations: Long life cycles, system-relevant processes or dependencies of entire industries on certain products can quickly put companies at risk in the event of disruptive events. We have developed resilience strategies and recommendations for a number of technologies, product groups and industries, which we would like to share with you here.

 

Resilience in aviation

The white paper uses the example of aviation to describe the issues that companies need to consider in order to strengthen their resilience.

Resilience in food production

Our new white paper shows more resilient processes and systems for food production.

Resilience in strategic management

Here we show how resilience can be anchored in strategic management.

Crisis security in toolmaking

Our study describes the fields of action for toolmaking in the event of a crisis.

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.ipt.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ipt/de/documents/Studien/Studie-Resilienz.pdf

 

An Additive Manufacturing breakthrough

This white paper describes the current status and future of additive manufacturing on an industrial scale.

 

Resilience in strategy work

This study describes what strategy work can look like in normal and crisis situations.