Remanufacturing as emergency manufacturing option to secure electronics supply in crisis

Other conference contribution, 2025

In unsecure times, authorities responsible for societal infrastructure and services need to further explore and develop alternatives of their current supply chains. Swedish authorities have been tasked to analyse and increase security of supply for critical products and components.
For many types of products and parts it may be an option to start, or ramp up, local emergency production in time of crisis. When it comes to electronics products they often have long and global supply chains why it may be difficult to source and produce locally, thus remanufacturing or refurbishing may be a viable emergency production option. A managerial question to research here is when remanufacturing is a viable emergency production option and what obstacles exist to prepare for such emergency production. In this study of two cases of electronics small-scale remanufacturing in Sweden is presented. Case company A is a lego-remanufacturer who remanufactures mainly spare parts on contractual basis for several industries. Case company B is an original equipment supplier of power electronics and mainly produce new modular products, but as a service to regular customers they also take back and remanufacture old modules. The two cases conceptualize two major options to consider in securing local electronics supply when global supply chains have failed. The case companies’ different situations are discussed together with previous findings in literature.