Review of supply chain configuration and design decision-making for new product

Abstract

The nature of competitive markets continuously pushes manufacturers to develop new products to meet the increasingly diversified customer demands. Manufacturers thus have to handle the complexities generated during the total life cycles of various product types, from product design to procurement, production, marketing and recycling. Though some management practices in mass customisation help to improve the performance of manufacturing systems, there are still some fundamental problems not covered. Joint decision-making of product and supply chain design, for example, is one of them. The existing industrial practice tends to treat these two problems separately. Decoupling these two problems decrease the design complexity but may lead to suboptimal decision outcome. To enhance understanding of the interconnected decisions for supply chain management and product design, this review collects related literature on this topic and focuses on the analysis of existing papers from an operation research perspective.

Keywords:

• supply chain configuration
• supply chain design
• new product
• joint design

Acknowledgments

The authors want to express their thankfulness to the reviewers for their valuable inputs and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.