Week 14 - Redesign Supply Chain Processes

Source / Reference:
1)"Product architecture assessment: a tool to link product, process, and supply chain design decisions" by 
Sebastian K. Fixson, Research in Journal of operations management [0272-6963] Fixson, Sebastian yr:2005 vol:23 iss:3-4 pg:345 -369 
http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.lb.polyu.edu.hk/science/article/pii/S027269630400110X


Subject:
Link business process, product and supply chain design decisions together


Motivation:


In the last lecture, Redesign Supply Chain Processes, the concepts of supply chain and redesigning process of supply chain are taught. Since supply chain is cross-organizational in nature, misalignments occur in e-process, information and knowledge. Therefore, redesigning the partner interface process (PIP) is a need to reduce misalignments in the supply chain process. However, the focus of reengineering the PIP is on the collaboration among enterprises, which may be rather passive in terms of the whole business process and product/service. How to link the business process, product and supply chain design decisions together in order to assess the relationship and have a better, more precise redesign is the motivation of this blog. 


Introduction
For many manufacturing firms, heightened competition has brought back into focus the value of considering manufacturing concerns during product design, and to overlap formerly sequential design processes. More recently, the competition has intensified for many firms through increased demand heterogeneity and shorter product life cycles. Formerly large mass markets have fractured into smaller niche markets demanding higher levels of product variety while competitors are introducing new products in shorter intervals. To respond to these pressures, many firms have put customization of mass produced products at the center of their attention.
A concept of “concurrent enterprising’ is addressed to describe the future direction of mass customization, to achieve an alliance of customers, products, processes, and logistics by means of parallelity, integration, standardization, teamwork, and many others, for delivering an increasing product variety to satisfy diverse customer needs while maintaining near mass production efficiency. A comprehensive product architecture assessment methodology can serve as the hub to link these decisions with each other.


Product architecture assessment
In order to achieve the ultimate goal to assess the impact of product architecture decisions on decisions in the domains of product, process, and supply chain, what is needed then is a method to determine where in between these extremes – modular and integral – a particular design is located in the space of possible function–component mappings, how two or more mappings compare to each other with respect to their locations in this space. The product architecture assessment framework combines the comprehensiveness of the conceptual models with the operationalizability of the engineering models and lays the foundation for mathematical models to be applied to individual aspects.


Dimension 1: function–component allocation scheme
To build on the definition that a characteristic feature of product architecture is the way in which functions are allocated to components requires a mechanism that determines and measures this dimension reliably. In other words, all three pieces of the function–component allocation scheme need a rule-based procedure to ensure repeatable results of function, component and the allocation scheme.


Dimension 2: interface characteristics
Products can exhibit different degrees of being coupled, depending on the product life cycle phase. The interface measurement needs to be conducted on a disaggregated level to allow investigation of the individual effects. To make the dimension interface measurable, the information are grouped into three categories: type, reversibility and standardization. In each category, the corresponding interface characteristic is assessed individually. Like the function–component allocation, the interface assessment investigates the characteristics of the interfaces only on the determined hierarchy level.


Link all things together: product architecture maps
Together with the function–component allocation data and the interface information completes the description of the product architecture, adding the information for all three interface dimensions to the function–component allocation map results in the product architecture map. These product architecture maps show in their x–y plane how the functions are allocated to the components. Independent from that, and independent of each other, the different interface dimensions are shown along the vertical axis (z). These product architecture maps serve as a graphic representation of the complete product architecture description. They allow quick visual references of similarities and differences of the analyzed product architectures. 

Product architecture change in the FCA scheme

Product architecture coordinates design decisions across process and product domains

Conclusion
Product architecture assessment is a multi-dimensional descriptive product architecture framework. This framework integrates insights from literature streams on new product development, operations management, and supply chain management. This framework can serve multiple purposes in management and research.
In practical, more information and linkage among the three aspects: process, product and supply chain are visualized through this assessment to assist in making decision.