Impacts on Supply Chain Management through Component Commonality and Postponement: A Case Study

Component commonality and postponement have been the focus of research for the last twenty years. Since then numerous models and theories have been developed, but industrial evidence is still rare. This work will make a contribution and show the positive benefits of postponement and component commonality in the automotive industry. The insights from literature and a case study are combined to evaluated the impacts on the supply chain variables coordination, collaboration and configuration. The notion of this work is to convince companies in making combined component commonality and postponement decision rather than separate ones.