Uncertainties in the global market, including supply chain disruptions, local content requirements, and geopolitical conflicts, pose significant risks to manufacturers relying on centralized production systems. Movable factories, mobile manufacturing systems (MMS), and associated frameworks have been proposed in the literature as ways to achieve resilient production networks. However, these deployable manufacturing systems' planning and management aspects remain largely overlooked. This paper explores how manufacturing companies can enhance resilience by adopting military rapid deployment planning principles to deploy production capabilities to geographically dispersed areas swiftly.

The current uncertain and volatile business context is challenging firms worldwide, leading to the need to be responsive at a competitive cost. This trend is so substantial that it even affects industries traditionally competing in rather stable contexts, such as the process industry. Although the process industry includes multiple sectors with different technologies and processes, these share several aspects that make the industry as a whole distinctive to the discrete manufacturing industry. Based on a literature review, this study identifies and describes trends leading the process industry to the need for responsiveness, corresponding solutions to accommodate the need, and related challenges hindering the industrialization and diffusion of solutions in this industry. This study shows that trends, such as the uncertainty and volatility of market requirements, are challenging the process industry to develop reconfigurability solutions across multiple production levels. The development of reconfigurability solutions is hindered by modularity, integrability, co-ordination and collaboration challenges.

This paper discusses the issue of transferring knowledge from recent research to practitioners in the fast-paced world of development. Research is often not presented in a way that is easily digestible to practitioners, leading to a lag in industry adopting new findings. The REKON dissemination format is presented as a solution to this problem making knowledge about reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) available for over 100 Danish manufacturing companies. The effectiveness of the REKON dissemination format is evaluated through surveys and initial results indicate that it has been successful in transferring knowledge about RMS and its potential to participating companies.