Design for Supply Chain Requirements: An Approach to Detect the Capabilities to Postpone

Different development trends pose new challenges for companies. They often meet these challenges by developing new product variants. Internally, this leads to an increased complexity, both at the product and at the supply chain level, which are mutually connected. The existing approaches and methods of complexity management only focus on one of the observed levels and do not consider the mutual connectivity. Modularity and platform strategy are the most common approaches to reduce the complexity at the level of product design. At the level of supply chain processes, the most common strategies are postponement and process commonality. These approaches do not support selecting the optimal complexity management strategy as for example the proper level of modularization or the optimal depth of added value (postponement). Therefore, this paper presents an approach to detect the capabilities to postpone, which accomplishes more transparency about the supply chain processes and the opportunities and capabilities of the individual supply chain stations. This transparency supports the supply chain management as well as the product development in the reduction of internal complexity.