Analysis of Product Complexity considering Disruption Cost in Fast Fashion Supply Chain

Abstract

Outsourcing in the textile industry has been playing an important role in the global economy for six decades. Recently, reshoring is an emerging trend due to various complexities involved in supply chain management. As compared with basic textile and apparel products, fast fashion products are complex in their own way. A single assortment contains several new styles, colors, and sizes with unpredictable demand and urgent deadlines. Numerous assortments run simultaneously in the supply chain. For each assortment, the garment manufacturer has to source various types of fabrics and materials from different suppliers and then manufacture the garments to ship within the deadlines. This complexity contributes to supply chain disruption. This paper develops a model to estimate supply chain disruption cost as a function of fast fashion product complexity in the global outsourcing environment. Estimation of disruption cost will help us to increase visibility and eliminate the bottlenecks in supply chain. Model conclusions are used to develop a method to manage the level of product complexity from the global supply chain perspective. Several strategies are proposed to manage the impact of product complexity on supply chain design.

Product complexity and operational performance: A systematic literature review

“…3.6.1 General manufacturing costs. There are numerous articles supporting the claim that increased PC leads to increased manufacturing and supply chain costs (Alford et al, 2000;Berman, 2011;Bozarth et al, 2009;Ding et al, 2007;Lanza et al, 2010;Mapes et al, 1997;Moreno and Terwiesch, 2017;Roy et al, 2011;Sardar and Lee, 2015;Silveira, 1998;Squire et al, 2006;Sun and Ding, 2010;Thonemann and Bradley, 2002;Wan and Dresner, 2015;Wong and Eyers, 2011;Zhang and Tseng, 2007). Most of these studies suggest a linear relationship between the number of finished products or product families produced and operations costs.…”

“…The number of components or the number of options for a specific component (e.g., layers on a computer chip, options for auxiliary parts, number of component configurations, packaging type) (Bozarth et al, 2009;Brun and Pero, 2012;Closs et al, 2010;Er and MacCarthy, 2006;Escobar-Saldívar et al, 2008;Holweg, 2005;Hsieh and Tong, 2006;Huang and Inman, 2010;Inman and Blumenfeld, 2014;Kadakia et al, 1994;Keil et al, 2014;Roy et al, 2011;Sardar and Lee, 2015;Shah et al, 2017;Zhang and Tseng, 2007) 15…”

“…The number of product families or product lines (e.g., car makes and models) (Moreno and Terwiesch, 2017;Nandkeolyar and Christy, 1992;Sardar and Lee, 2015;Shah et al, 2017;Wong and Eyers, 2011;Zhang and Tseng, 2007) Varies but aggregates measures of the number of product families, the number of components, customization of products, average parts per BOM, the degree of modularity, the ability to add new products, etc. (Blome et al, 2014;Caniato and Größler, 2015;Christensen et al, 2007;Eckstein et al, 2015;Hegde et al, 2005;Helkiö and Tenhiälä, 2013;Koh et al, 2005;Thomé, Sousa and Scavarda do Carmo, 2014;Tracey, 2004)…”

Fashion 4.0. Innovating fashion industry through digital transformation

“…And, more recently, fashion companies have been at the very centre of mass-production dynamics, transforming and reacting to impacts that technological innovation combined with globalization processes have produced. It often over-exploited the mass-production model without considering the medium-long term effects of its complex and globalized operations, impacting many times with high environmental costs and contributing to social marginalisation (Ashby 2016;Sardar & Lee 2015). But today, being fashion such a relevant global business, its transition towards "smart factory" models can produce remarkable impacts in terms of more efficient and sustainable production modes.…”

A New Methodology of Multicriteria Decision-Making in Supplier Selection Based onZ-Numbers

“…Mari et al also discussed the construction of a resilient supply chain growth algorithm based on a complex network theory for designing a resilient supply chain network [13]. Some other researches related to the issue of supply chain management can also be inspiring, such as [14][15][16]. Additionally, some models of uncertain information process are proposed to deal with decision-making under uncertain environment [17,18]; these methods can be easily expanded to the issue of selection of suppliers.…”