32 n RESILIENCE July/August 2026 www.drivesncontrols.com How to stay afloat when disruption hits Over the past few years, we’ve been hit by what feels like an endless barrage of challenges – including wars, geopolitical sanctions, skilled labour shortages, scarcely available critical components, and the lingering fallout of the global pandemic. This catalogue of calamities has exposed weaknesses across many worldwide manufacturing operations. According to the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply, short-term supply anxiety hit record highs among procurement professionals globally during March and April this year. While chinks of light might be starting to appear, business confidence in the UK remains low, as seen in Make UK’s latest manufacturing outlook, which revealed that investment intentions among UK manufacturers nosedived from 20% to 8% during the second quarter of this year. At SEW-Eurodrive, the uncertainty has made us look more closely at our own systems and how to evolve them further to boost resilience, adaptability and visibility across our operations. To manage your supply chains effectively, you need to make sure your procurement and production processes are closely aligned. Good communications between departments, with shared priorities, helps to improve planning and scheduling, as well as reducing disruption when parts become scarce or demand increases. Over the past few years, we’ve analysed our own supply chains to see where we needed to focus our efforts, identifying inventory management and multi-sourcing as important areas where we could improve the resilience of our material supplies. This has led to us increasing our storage capabilities for long-life goods and electronic components. We’ve also stepped up monitoring of global events such as geopolitical disruption and natural disasters that could impact component availability. The expanded inventory, alongside the early warning system of what could affect it, gives greater visibility to prioritise resources more effectively and to react before issues escalate. Outside of proactive inventory management and planning, reducing reliance on a single supplier or region means that if one part of the world is experiencing more disruption than another, you can turn elsewhere to keep your production moving. It can’t apply to everything though. When we looked at the semiconductor supply chain, it was clear that regional selfsufficiency is impossible. With a supply chain spanning Asia, Europe and the US, and competition coming from high-volume sectors such as automotive and consumer electronics, visibility was – and is – vital. To improve our set-up, we moved towards long-term partnerships instead of short-term transactional deals. This strengthens our relationships with our suppliers, and keeps everyone on the same page, with improved supply chain stability. When manufacturers rely on rigid production set-ups, especially with outdated machinery, failure of a single drive, or a missing critical component such as a semiconductor, can bring production to a halt. Modular set-ups reduce this risk by breaking up larger systems into smaller units that can operate independently, so faults can be isolated earlier, and lines reconfigured quickly to maintain uptime. This can be helped by real-time data-sharing across drive systems, ensuring that the true operational status of production lines is transparent. If engineers don’t know which materials are where, what’s been delayed, or which issues are arising second-by-second, they can’t react in good time when things go wrong. Building operational resilience must therefore begin on the factory floor where day-to-day decisions are made. A great point of reference for this is the software-defined factory. This is where flexibility is built into production lines from the start, taking a software-layer based approach which removes a reliance on hardware systems and shifts instead to real-time simulation and rapid reconfiguration. For manufacturers wanting to weather the storm, the answer lies in treating resilience as part of everyday operations. Better inventory visibility, closer supplier partnerships, and flexible factory floors give teams the agility to keep production moving. n As the manufacturing industry tries to recover from continued disruption, SEW-Eurodrive’s chief innovation officer, Dr Hans Krattenmacher, explores where factories are most fragile, and the steps they can take to ensure resilience. Real-time data-sharing across drive systems can help to isolate faults earlier and to maintain uptime
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