Postponement Strategies in Supply Chain Management

Postponement strategy is one of the major supply chain management (SCM) pr- tices that has a discernible impact on rms’ competitive advantage and organi- tional performance. Postponement is a mass customization strategy that captures the advantages of both mass production and mass customization. Recent research studies have identi ed four common postponement strategies, namely pull, logistics, form and price postponement. The former three postponement strategies are linked to production and manufacturing, while the last one is a pure pricing strategy. They aim at balancing the costs and bene ts of mass production and mass customization. Practical examples of postponement can be found in the high-tech industry, food industry and other industries that require high differentiation. However, empirical studies have found that postponement may not be an evident SCM practice compared to the other practices. In addition, postponement has both positive and negative impacts on a supply chain. The advantages include following the JIT principles, reducing end-product inventory, making forecasting easier and pooling risk. The high cost of designing and manufacturing generic components is the main drawback of postponement. Thus, the evaluation of postponement strategy is an important research issue and there have been many qualitative and quantitative models for analyzing postponement under different scenarios.

Within supply chain management (SCM), postponement is a deliberate action to delay final manufacturing or distribution of a product until receipt of a customer order. This reduces the incidence of wrong manufacturing or incorrect inventory deployment. Postponement strategies and practices serve to reduce the anticipatory risk in a supply chain. It can be fine-tuned or staged so that only the generic parts shared by a firm’s various end products are warehoused, used only once orders come in for whichever products are selling, and will reduce inventory pressures throughout the firm.  Despite much existing research in the area, no one book devoted solely to postponement has been published.

At its core, Postponement Strategies in Supply Chain Management analyzes how both pull postponement strategy and form postponement strategy can be leveraged to yield substantial benefits to adopting firms in different competitive environments.  The book is intended for researchers in supply chain management interested in conducting in-depth studies on postponement strategies. It is also intended for practitioners trying to understand the workings of postponement strategies and looking for guidance and decision support for the implementation of postponement strategies. Therefore, the book can be useful not only for researchers but also for practitioners and graduate students in operations management, management science, and business administration.