The benefits of global sourcing as part of a firm's purchasing strategy have been widely discussed in the academic literature, yet so there are few models that provide a comprehensive risk and cost assessment to guide managerial decision-making. In particular, few models capture the dynamic...

Purpose – The need for an efficient provision of product variety has been widely established as a means of competing in the marketplace, yet previous studies into the management of product variety have commonly analysed products in isolated developed markets. The purpose of this paper is to...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to develop a typology of co‐located supplier clusters, such as logistics centres or supplier parks, and second, to evaluate the theoretical perspectives at hand to investigate the co‐location phenomenon. Design/methodology/approach –...

Manufacturing systems in many industries face the challenge of manufacturing products that are assembled from multi-variant components. Demand for these component variants is correlated, and often subjected to an overall capacity constraint (e.g. fixed production volumes in the final assembly...

Purpose – While the concept of supply chain responsiveness (SCR) has received considerable attention in the operations management literature, mostly under the auspices of concepts such as build‐to‐order, mass customisation, lean and agility, so far there is a lack of comprehensive...

Despite the fact that the benefits of lean production have been documented across many industry settings, firms find it difficult to extend lean principles downstream into their distribution systems. In this paper we review and synthesize previous contributions on lean principles towards...

The establishment of supplier parks (i.e., the co-location of component suppliers in the immediate vicinity of the vehicle assembly plant), is a relatively recent phenomenon in the automotive industry. The first supplier park officially labeled as such was opened in Abrera, Spain, in 1992 to...