Chapter 8: Concurrent development and engineering

Title: Aligning supply chain management and new product development: a general framework

Author(s): Margherita Pero, Andrea Sianesi

Address: Politecnico di Milano, Via G. Colombo, 40 I-20133 Milano | Politecnico di Milano, Via G. Colombo, 40 I-20133 Milano

Reference: International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management 2007 pp. 489 - 498

Abstract/Summary: Competition in the global marketplace, evolving technologies, the need to satisfy more and more sophisticated customers and the shortening product life cycles are some of the fundamental challenges that firms are facing. To remain competitive, firms should generate new products, while maintaining high supply chain performances. Therefore they should align the objectives of the processes of New Product Development (NPD) and Supply Chain Management (SCM). An analysis of the literature shows that the "commonality-variety" trade-off is one of the main issue when addressing this topic, as it has strong impacts on supply chain, while being one of the most important decision taken during NPD. In this article we propose a framework for studying the possibility to align NPD process and SCM process by aligning the level of variety that is created during NPD and the variety that is/can transported, in order to improve supply chain performances. To sustain and obtain alignment new PLM solutions should be proposed.

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