IMPACTS ON SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT AND ITS FLEXIBILITY THROUGH COMPONENT COMMONALITY AND POSTPONEMENT

The current trend to shortening product lifecycles and the uncertainty in the dynamics of global markets force companies to increase flexibility in supply chain management. In spite of the importance of the interdependencies between product design and supply chains, the contribution of product design principles to supply chain management flexibility has not been, so far, sufficiently investigated in the scientific literature. This research will show the positive benefits of combining postponement and component commonality in the automotive industry. Insights from literature and a case study are combined to evaluated the impacts on the supply chain variables coordination, collaboration and configuration and its flexibility. The notion of this work is to convince companies in making combined component commonality and postponement decisions rather than separate ones.