IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/brh/wpaper/1106.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Manufacturing Postponement: reducing upstream vulnerability by means of an improved flexibility

Author

Listed:
  • Jury Gualandris
  • Matteo Giacomo Maria Kalchschmidt

Abstract

As supply chain vulnerabilities and the dependence of companies to their parents (i.e., suppliers) intensify, companies are adopting manufacturing postponement in order to reduce potential negative effects of supply risks. Indeed, manufacturing postponement allows firms to properly manage point of differentiations along their production lines, improving companies' reactions capabilities. This study built a framework that relates the adoptions of postponement underlying tactics (i.e., product modularity and process re-sequencing) to the development of flexibility and to the achievement of competitive advantage (i.e., reduced exposition to supply risks). Based on data collected from 54 Italian manufacturing companies we show that the adoption of manufacturing postponement directly influence firms' resiliency. Furthermore, we show that this relationship can be partially explained by an indirect path through flexibility.

Suggested Citation

  • Jury Gualandris & Matteo Giacomo Maria Kalchschmidt, 2011. "Manufacturing Postponement: reducing upstream vulnerability by means of an improved flexibility," Working Papers 1106, Department of Management, Information and Production Engineering, University of Bergamo.
    • Handle: RePEc:brh:wpaper:1106
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10446/25238
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:brh:wpaper:1106. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: University of Bergamo Library (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/diberit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.