Linking Product, Supply Chain, Process and Manufacturing Planning and Control Design

In order to improve upon competitive capabilities, firms need to understand how manufacturing and supply chain operations should be designed to better support market requirements. The interrelationships between product characteristics, supply chain design, process choice and the design of manufacturing planning and control principles is a complex problem generating increasing interest in industry and academia. How these decisions should be coordinated is an important issue for operational and supply chain performance. How product characteristics affect one or the other has previously been discussed in the literature. Three fundamental theoretical models are the product-supply chain model by Fisher (1997), the product-process matrix by Hayes and Wheelwright (1979a) and the systems-strategy model for linking manufacturing planning and control (MPC) system choices to product characteristics by Berry and Hill (1992). Other models have been proposed for linking product characteristics to supply chain design, process choice and MPC approaches, but all relate strongly to these three models. Thus, these three models can be considered as baseline reference models. They have been tested before, but only one at the time. Here, we provide a comprehensive analysis of all four factors.