managing product variety in the apparel supply chain; a concurrent engineering approach

providing wider variety of products often leads to higher complexity in the manufacturing and business system. finding appropriate methods and techniques to manage these difficulties is going to be an attractive topic for researchers in operations management. by adopting a qualitative approach we have investigated the product variety management in the apparel supply chain. the main contributions of this research are as follow: (1) identification and assortment of dimensions of product variety in the apparel products, (2) developing variety reduction model along the apparel supply chain, and (3) introducing a descriptive framework to fill the variety gaps, in different levels of decision making.