Some weeks ago I wrote about Fisher’s suggestions on how to select the right supply chain for your product. But how to continue from there? How do different products affect the further planning steps needed?
This again is an old classic in supply chain risk literature. In 1997 Marshall L. Fisher published this article in the Harvard Business Review targeting a simple question: “What is the Right Supply Chain for Your Product?”
It is noteworthy that this appears to be one of the most often cited papers in supply chain management. So I overlook the fact that it is quite weak on the methodological foundations.
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.
