Integrating suppliers into new product development (NPD) projects offers manufacturers the potential for substantial improvements in the new product being designed. However, it also creates significant inter-organizational integration diseconomies that can negatively affect the manufacturing...

Intervention-Based Research (IBR) is a research method where scholars closely interact with practicing managers in understanding and solving complex problems, with the ultimate goal of generating novel theoretical insights. IBR calls for researchers to be actively involved in the problem-solving...

Form postponement has been widely acknowledged as one of the main avenues to mitigate the adverse effects of product proliferation or customization on operational performance. As it often happens with long debated concepts, the proposed definitions of form postponement sometimes display...

When a firm offers customized products, variants and options may end up confusing the customer, instead of increasing sales. Recent developments in Information and Communication Technology made available a class of software products, often termed as "product configurators", which appears to...

Offering to customers a high variety of products while guaranteeing competitive prices and reasonable delivery times is an ever-increasing necessity for companies. At the same time, the growing technological content of products contributes further to this complexity, introducing new challenges...

Operations management literature defines form postponement as the deferment of product differentiation activities through changes in the architecture and/or the manufacturing and distribution process of a product family. We contend that when form postponement is meant to reduce the risk and...

The present paper reports preliminary observations from a longitudinal case study of the Lawn Mowers & Garden Tractors business unit of Deere & Company. This business unit is interested in analyzing the applicability of a Build-To-Order strategy for its business. By analyzing the problems...