Inventory and Package Postponement Strategy

Manufacturing and Form Postponement

Postponement is a growing trend in manufacturing. It can lead to superior supply chains. Form postponement (FP) involves the delay of final manufacturing until a customer order is received and is commonly regarded as an approach to mass customisation. Mass customisation is a trend towards the production and distribution of individually customised goods and services for a mass market. It is prov...

Capacitated Multi-Item Inventory Systems with Random and Seasonally Fluctuating Demands: Implications for Postponement Strategies

We address multi-item inventory systems with random and seasonally fluctuating, and possibly correlated, demands. The items are produced in two stages, each with its own lead-time; in the first stage a common intermediate product is manufactured. The production volumes in the first stage are bounded by given capacity limits. We develop an accurate lower bound and close-to-optimal heuristic stra...

Case Study on the Application of Postponement Strategy and Managerial Insights

Postponement is an organizational concept whereby some of the activities in the supply chain are not performed until customer order is received. Postponement is increasingly drawing the attention of company, which not only allows company to maintain cost effectiveness and economies of scale but also increases the flexibility of the operating system and the timeliness of delivery. In China, comp...

Multi-Commodity Flow and Multi-Period Equilibrium Model of Supply Chain Network with Postponement Strategy

With the constant changes of the market demand trends and modern information technology which greatly influence supply chain operation and management, postponement has been developed to be an important strategy in some of the supply chain processes. This paper studies the multi-period and multi-commodity flow supply chain network equilibrium problem with postponement strategy under a type of su...

On postponement and birth intervals