This review is about a preprint article which already has been accepted for publication by the “European Journal of Operational Research”. But since there is only a limited space for articles in each issue of the journal, final publication of the article is delayed.
Submitted by Daniel Dumke on Fri, 2011-07-29 12:34
Even though I read a lot of news this week, there wasn’t much supply chain related. But on the bright side this week has brought several great blog posts that I like to share with you.
In research the decisions on the product and the corresponding supply chain are usually separated. This happens for a variety of reasons, one may be the reduction of problem complexity, another that the research focus is on a brown field approach where the products are seen as given.
Many companies are struggling with the idea to use modern optimization techniques to support decision making in strategic supply chain management.
But beside mathematical modeling of the supply chain there are other methods as well, such as network based approaches. In their 2005 paper Blackhurst, Wu and O’Grady present a more intuitive decision support method with the goal to improve decisions within the supply chain context.
Experts from research and business alike argue that within the last decades consumers have grown to be a more demanding factor for supply chain management. At the same time manufacturing and supply chain strategies adapted to this development (from lean to agile, see Christopher and Towill, 2000).
Is there consensus about the role of product design as the leading function in the supply chain? Not yet! This article introduces the topic of integrating decisions in product and supply chain design and gives a short glimpse on the “how to implement” part.
