Enhancing physical asset resilience in apparel manufacturing: insights from industry experts

Abstract

Apparel manufacturing organisations heavily rely on a wide range of physical assets, such as machinery, equipment, and infrastructure, to maintain continuous operations, meet production demands, and ultimately achieve organisational objectives. Ensuring the resilience of these physical assets, referred to as Physical Asset Resilience (PAR), is crucial for sustaining operational continuity, particularly in the face of potential disruptions such as physical asset failures, blackouts, deterioration, and supply chain delays. Though literature identifies four key capacities of PAR as anticipative, absorptive, restorative, and adaptive capacity, which determine the total PAR capacity of an organisation, there is limited evidence on how these capacities can be enhanced for improved PAR. To address this gap, this study explores the practices that can be integrated into physical asset management practices in order to enhance PAR in the apparel manufacturing organisations. A qualitative research approach was employed using semi-structured interviews with five industry experts who have extensive knowledge and experience in facility operations, physical asset management, and physical asset resilience. The findings confirmed the relevance of the four PAR capacities and identified key practices, including maintaining a skilled workforce, maintaining backup physical assets, allocating required financial resources, conducting risk assessments, conducting scenario planning and others that strengthen resilience in apparel organisations. Experts also highlighted context-specific practices unique to the apparel sector, providing an evidence-based foundation for improving physical asset resilience.