Manufacturing Strategy in a Post Covid-19 Era

Manufacturing is complex. A variety of employees work in a network of domestic and foreign facilities to achieve the objectives of the business. The Covid-19 pandemic has adversely disturbed the business across the globe. One of the hardest hit segments from Covid-19 is the manufacturing sector. In such a challenging business environment, the various strategies viz. manufacturing, finance, marketing, R & D, etc interlock to provide the company’s competitive advantage.  The essence of manufacturing strategy is to formulate explicitly how the manufacturing decisions will be made so that manufacturing will help the company achieve the long term advantage over its competitors.
The need of the hour is to introduce employee safety measures along with best hygiene and sanitization practices at workplace; revisit their sourcing strategies, review their crisis or emergency response plans, optimise and streamline e-commerce and distribution networks, evaluate supply chain strategy and make it more resilient, etc
However, the role of Manufacturing Strategy in organization competitiveness is still not well understood by practitioners.