Postponement planning and implementation from CE perspective

Resumo

Nowadays manufacturing companies are facing the challenge of meeting increasing specific customer needs and even so, to offer short delivery times and low price products. Companies must have flexibility to customize products in a rapid way. A product customization strategy, named "Postponement", has been adopted by a growing number of companies to address the products' differentiation requirements, demanded by the new global market. This paper aims to contrast and compare a proposed postponement strategy definition method with existing postponement approaches found in the literature. The paper reviews various approaches from different authors, to identify how postponement is described in terms of its benefits, implementation barriers, factors that enable or make difficult its practice and the relationship with other theories and techniques. The paper then highlights the contribution given by a proposed method to plan and implement the postponement strategy in a company, using a concurrent engineering perspective. © 2007 Springer-Verlag London Limited.

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