Concurrent Product – Supply Chain Design: A Conceptual Framework & Literature Review

Abstract

The capability to concurrently design the product and the supply chain is becoming a key competence in manufacturing companies. In spite of this development, this competence is still underdeveloped in industry. Research has not been able to fill this industrial capability gap partly because there is a lack of convergence of the methodologies for concurrent product and supply chain design in the research community. Moreover, a dominant and practical methodology in concurrent product and supply chain design in the industries has not yet emerged. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a novel conceptual framework termed Concurrent Design Attribute – Trade-Off Pyramid (CDA-TOP). Based on this framework, we provide a literature review with special focus on design trade-off attributes and methodologies.