The concept of postponement has a long history of academic literature and practical applications. The recent literature has also well documented that the need for postponement is driven by today's market and business environment. However, its applications are still not as widespread as expected....

This paper describes the aims, methodology and results of an empirical research project. The aim was to gather new insight about how collaborative decision-making processes in the conceptual engineering design phase of the product development process takes place. The insight contributes to...

The research presented in this paper has focussed on exploring buyer—supplier relationships from a human perspective. The research has been successful in exploring issues affecting buyer—supplier relationships. A methodology for aligning supply chains by taking into account human issues has...

The quality of decision making in product development (PD) is dependent upon the designer's ability to optimize conflicting needs. However, optimization is unlikely to succeed when based on inaccurate or erroneous information. Given that provision of accurate information frequently lies beyond...

Performance improvement capability isrelated to an organization’s ability to utilize afundamental asset, the knowledge that resides with itsemployees, together with learning from past projectsand having good links to external knowledge sources.Firms that develop mechanisms to...