Modularity Metric in Reconfigurable Supply Chain

Abstract

Confronted with an increasingly uncertain and fluctuating economic environment characterized by a technological evolution driven by industry 4.0 concepts, companies have to adapt their supply chains in order to improve its competitiveness. They must also implement strategies that allows them to deal with these new challenges. Supply chain modularity offers the opportunity to change and reorganize the structure of the supply chain to meet changing market needs. In this paper, we propose a new framework to design a modular supply chain using Design Structure Matrix and a modularity measurement in Reconfigurable Supply Chain. We also show the importance of integrating the direction of flows, i.e. inbound and outbound flows in the calculation of modularity and, in particular, its impact on lead time. Finally, an illustrative example is developed to validate the proposed measurement.

Enabling adaptability and resilience of a global production network: A model to evaluate capital and operational expenses of reconfigurable production systems

“…Throughout Eqs. (25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33) and (38) variables are limited to v > 0 whereas v ≥ 0 is covered by variables directly related to reconfigurations in Eqs. (34)(35)(36)(37).…”

“…It has increased the gap to industrial contexts [24], which is critical due to the importance of GPNs in the economy [2] and as reconfigurable systems can facilitate adaptability and resilience [11,12]. This issue is also generally present in the research area of reconfigurability where the network level has been largely neglected [12,25,26], although potentials have been identified [27][28][29]. This imposes a challenge for the industrial implementation [30].…”

Process Modularity Impact on Manufacturing Lead Time and Throughput Rate in Terms of Mass Customization

“…Piran et al [24] provided evidence of the cause-effect trend between modularity and reduction in manufacturing lead time for the orders received by a bus manufacturing company. Zidi et al [25] stated that modularity positively impacts manufacturing time, but without enumeration proof. The manuscript [26] provided the example where time is minimized by modularity; other authors [24] studied modularity in relation to delivery time, while delivery time variables were minimized for this purpose.…”

Influence of Manufacturing Process Modularity on Lead Time Performances and Complexity

“…Input variables for this complexity measure need to be extracted from production orders and scheduling tasks. Moreover, there are several works which are focused on exploration of positive modularity impact on manufacturing lead time, e.g., [44][45][46][47][48].…”