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Project name:

Adaptive and resilient production and supply chain methods and solutions for urgent need of vital medical supplies and equipment (CO-VERSATILE)

Status: In Realisation
Creation date: 25-05-2020

Project objectives:

The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly spread across countries and regions, causing huge impact on people’s lives and communities. Starting as a health crisis, it now poses serious threats to the global economy, trade, and finance, with the estimated economic impacts to range between $2 trillion and $4.1 trillion globally (ADB 2020a). Surging demand, partly joined with panic buying, hoarding, and misuse of personal protective equipment (PPE) amid the COVID-19 pandemic, has created an urgent problem with the shortage of critical supplies and equipment for both the healthcare sector and the wider society. This situation has put Europe’s manufacturing system under very high pressure as the need for vital medical equipment is huge and pressing and the system is not managing to meet the needs. The dramatic rise in demand for medical supplies (e.g. surgical masks, goggles, gloves, gowns) as well as equipment (e.g. diagnostic technologies, biotechnologies etc.) has depleted stockpiles and prompted significant price increases and led to production backlogs of 4–6 months in fulfilling orders. Overall, the trends and flows described by the epidemiologic curve are forcing our economy and manufacturing industry to face scenarios that were, until now unforeseen: to meet rising global demand, WHO estimates that industry must increase manufacturing by 40% and urges governments to act quickly to boost supply.

To meet this demand, the usual manufacturing firms of these products have expanded their production as much as possible, and, in addition, policy makers are calling for firms across Europe’s manufacturing sectors to temporarily repurpose their production in order to increase global production capacity. This requires innovative and rapid solutions to make Europe’s manufacturing base even more versatile, flexible, resilient and adaptive and reorient very quickly production capacities and repurposing for them to meet the urgent need for medical equipment of our society. This will support Europe in preparing and improving the response and preparedness not only for the current crisis but also in case of potential future mayor outbreaks, thereby permanently improve Europe’s capacity to battle and deal with pandemics.

In addition, the global pandemic has caused a huge disruption of supply chains of especially raw materials, thereby making the materials needed for the production unavailable. The raw materials come from certain countries that during the pandemic have decided to concentrate the raw materials in manufacturing in their own countries, thereby cutting the supply of raw materials to Europe. This requires measures that ensures access to the raw materials in case of another spike of a pandemic, looking into local, regional and national sources.  

The project aims at increasing the adaptation capacity, resilience and flexibility of the European manufacturing sector, focussing on vital medical supplies and equipment, to support Europe in improving its response and preparedness to deal with pandemics.

The CO-VERSATILE project will adapt and repurpose a set of existing technologies and services to increase the adaptation capability of the European Manufacturing Industry. These services and technologies will be demonstrated within 7 Manufacturing Settings to produce vital medical equipment and then generalised for replication at European level. Manufacturing Settings consist of a set of production lines (SKM, ORP, ML, TECNOBIO and DEMCON) and manufacturing systems that can be exploited within production lines (MTC).

(O1) Deliver a rapid response to the ongoing emergency situation in the re-orientation and repurposing of production capacities.

(O2) Set up an accessible and democratic Digital Technopole for the re-orientation and repurposing of production capacities to meet the urgent needs of our societies for vital medical supplies and equipment.

(O3) Validate the proper operation of the Digital Technopole on 7 selected Manufacturing Settings to demonstrate a flexible 48-hour industrial response capability at scale, to ramp up production in response to  sudden future spikes in demand of strategic products (for instance medical equipment such as PPE, respirators), for requalification or release of production lines.

(O4) To assure the sustainability of the Digital Technopole and the multiplication of the offered services to the European Manufacturing Industry.

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