The impact of product life cycle on supply chain strategy

In order to compete in today's highly competitive marketplace supply chains must be engineered to match product characteristics and customer requirements. As products proceed through their life cycles these requirements dramatically change. Consequently supply chain strategies must be dynamically matched so as to maximize competitiveness. This paper demonstrates how an innovative UK lighting company re-engineered its supply chain to accommodate the impact of product life cycles. The key to their success is the ability to classify products and develop appropriate supply chain strategies. Careful matching ofproducts to pipelines thereby enables maximisation of the appropriate order winner and market qualifier characteristics. The classification system used enables generic modeling ofthe methodology and hence potential for use in other market sectors.

Keywords: Case study; Product life cycles; Product classification; Supply chain management

Studying the operational efficiencies of a multi-product supply chain using excel spreadsheet model

This paper presents a simple Excel spreadsheets-based model with @Risk add-in software that incorporates the effects of variability in demand, forecast and lead time. The model replicates a four-stage supply chain with multiple-retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers, and suppliers to demonstrate how a multi-product supply chain will react to certain changes. The model was created so that it could be used in either a teaching setting or in industry for making supply chain design decisions. From the teaching aspect, students can look at a supply chain and see the effects of changes without having to experience it firsthand. Professionals in industry can modify the model to make it more like their own supply chain and see what the affects are when they want to make changes in one or more attributes. Other key characteristics of a supply chain such as, bullwhip effect, total supply chain cost analysis and information sharing can also be studied using this model.

A flow-network approach for equilibrium of material requirements planning

Material requirements planning(MRP) has been a very popular and widely used multi-level inventory control method since 1970s. Recent developments in computer and information technology accelerate and facilitate the calculations necessary for MRP, but MRP is simply a system to open and trace the production/purchasingorders under pre-determined lead-time and lot size constraints. It does not directly include any optimization feature. In this article, an approach, which consists of the Flow Network with Side Constraints, is discussed in order to optimize the material flows in MRP problems. Additionally, an example case is given in order to show the applicability of the flow network formulation to APS. The model of the example case is solved and the computational results are given.

Dynamic Knowledge Map: reusing experts' tacit knowledge in the AEC industry

Much knowledge in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry is experience-based and tacit. Nevertheless, the typical strategy for knowledge management is focused on computer-based approaches for capturing and disseminating explicit knowledge. AEC firms have been successful at collecting and storing explicit information in enterprise databases, but they are poor at knowledge retrieval and exchange. Consequently, AEC professionals find it difficult to reuse core experts' knowledge for highly knowledge-intensive AEC activities. This situation calls for a method for disseminating tacit knowledge from experts' brains to achieve higher quality AEC projects. The primary purpose of this paper is to set a theoretical foundation for clarifying the contribution of experts' tacit knowledge in the AEC industry. The secondary purpose is to describe the concept for prototype software, Dynamic Knowledge Map, that can assist in the reuse of experts' tacit knowledge. Dynamic Knowledge Map is a Web-based knowledge navigator that searches for experts and facilitates communication with those experts by using internet technology. Higher performance levels theoretically can be achieved while accelerating the knowledge transfer processes. Future research will test the suitability of Dynamic Knowledge Map for tacit knowledge utilization in AEC organizations.

Keywords: Internet; Dynamic Knowledge Map; AEC

Knowledge web-based system architecture for collaborative product development

The manufacturing competitive environment has intensified in recent years. In this environment, companies do not possess all the knowledge they need but instead rely on other organizations. This results in the need of distance product development, which in turn requires information and knowledge in the place, time and format required. In response to this need the research community has come with a solution called collaborative product development (CPD) systems. This paper introduces the partial results of the ongoing research to propose a knowledge driven CPD system architecture, which will facilitate the provision of knowledge involved in product development. This paper presents the research issues and industrial requirements for such system. Furthermore, the proposed system architecture is described in detail and its implementation is presented using a case study of an injection moulded product.

Keywords: Collaborative product development; Manufacturing model; Injection moulding process information; Knowledge web-based Engineering