Using Postponement as a Rescheduling Strategy in the Supply Chain Management under Uncertain Demand Environment

Addressing demand uncertainty is a research focus in supply chain management in recent years. In this paper, a new postponement strategy is applied. Postponement has been appreciated recently, especially in the manufacturing period of realizing mass customization. It has also been much used to respond to the demand uncertainty and usually considered in the planning period. However, the decision role of postponement in the supplying process was little focused. It seems simple to utilize the intuitive concept of postponement to deal with demand uncertainty, but in effect there are so many factors and problems needing to be considered that the likely simple utilization becomes rather complex. In order to execute postponement, the strategy used in this paper relies much on the cooperation among the supply chain members. Based on the assumption of ideal cooperation, a linear programming model is established and demonstrated feasible and optimal in the supply chain scheduling under an uncertain demand environment, using postponement as rescheduling strategy.