Coordinating Product Design, Process Design And Supply Chain Design Decisions In RBTO Paradigm

With the responsiveness and customization becoming the new advantages of business, Rapid Build-to-Order is regarded as the ultimate challenge of supply chain operations. In order to achieve RBTO, many local enable technologies and management strategies are explored, but in this dissertation the perspective that coordinating product design, process design and supply chain design is the most important element of the success for RBTO is put forwarded, based on the analysis of a lot of decision conflict in practice of RBTO. It calls for study RBTO from the perspective of three-dimensional decision coordination. In this thinking four pieces of work have been done in this dissertation, generalized as such:The first is an empirical analysis of the impact of coordinating product design, process design, and supply chain design decisions on the capacity of RBTO system. Four auto manufacturers were surveyed and the information of their operations modes, product schemes, order fulfillment processes and the organization forms of supply chain were described, and the promoting effect of the three-dimensional decision coordination on the capacity of RBTO for each sample were contrasted and analyzed, during this course the theory assumption of that three-dimensional decision coordination will affect the capacity of RBTO system is testified, as well as the assumption of the operations performance of a coordinated system outgoing which of a uncoordinated one.Secondly, a study on three-dimensional architecture decision coordinating based on architecture description is processed. Product architecture, process architecture and supply chain architecture are described and the effect of different architecture on RBTO is analyzed, after these, a coordinating matrix of three-dimensional architecture is developed. In this study, a twin helix model is used to explain the reaction of customer demand on the change of product architecture, the spectrum of order fulfillment strategies is used to described the process architecture in RBTO paradigm, and the supplier park is used as the case to illustrate the integral supply chain's advantage for RBTO.The third work is to harmoniously configure the three-dimensional operations decisions based on Soft Systems Methodology (SSM). First, the conflicts and complex relationships between operations decision are discussed and the coordination idea is established, then the logic of strategy transition that stepping to RBTO from BTF for auto industry is developed, under the instruction of the 7 steps of SSM, and the three dimensional operations decisions are harmoniously configured in detail aiming the ultimate goal of RBTO system. The coherence of the three-dimensional operations decisions ensures the facilitation of one for others, and the strategy transition logic of BTF based on soft systems methodology will enrich the research in this field.At last, the coordinating degree of the three-dimensional design decisions and its evaluation method are discussed. The concept of coordinating degree is advanced to describe how extent the three-dimensional design decisions are coordinated, and the theory model of coordinating degree is bring forwarded. In order to measure the coordinating degree, the mathematic model of coordinating degree for the three dimensional design decisions is developed, and 5 performance indexes that can reflect the coordinating degree of operations decisions are used to be the entry of the model above, besides these, a numerical example is given to illustrate the model calculation.Coordinating the three-dimensional design decisions for RBTO mode is a enormous engineering, the works in this dissertation are just the primary study, a lot of problems left are to be explored.