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.
Highlights
Textile supply chain has a complex structure due to independently separated divisions and a sequence of complicated processes required in each division [1, 2]
The key aim of this paper is to propose a model of fast fashion product complexity for managing the supply chain disruption in the global outsourcing environment
Our focus is the product complexity related to elements of product complexity, degree of novelty in an assortment, and number of assortments running in supply chain
Summary
Textile supply chain has a complex structure due to independently separated divisions and a sequence of complicated processes required in each division [1, 2]. To the knowledge of the authors of this paper, no quantitative study exists to model and manage the impact of fast fashion product complexity from the supply chain point of view. Without understanding the realized costs of complexity, efficient means to reduce the future costs of complexity cannot be defined [15] If we ignore this issue, it can cause uncontrollable disruptions in terms of inventory obsolescence, much higher stocks, unreliable deliveries, economic crisis, and loss of competitiveness in the global textile and apparel supply chain. The key aim of this paper is to propose a model of fast fashion product complexity for managing the supply chain disruption in the global outsourcing environment. To achieve this aim, this paper makes the following contributions to the existing literature. Factors Variety of sizes Variety of designs Variety of materials Variety of products Variety of processes Variety of components Product modularity Number of parts or components needed to build the product Difficulty of generating different parts Interactions between parts or components Degree of product novelty/newness Production volume of running products Degree of order within the structure of elements of product Product structure complexity (v) Several strategies are proposed for managing the impact of product complexity for effective supply chain design
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