Purpose: Responding in a timely manner to product recalls emanating from the supply chain presents tremendous challenges for most firms. The source might be a supplier from the same industry located next door, or one from a completely different sector of the economy situated thousands of miles...

Supply-chain coordination relies on the availability of prompt and accurate information that is visible to all actors in the supply chain. However, new demands on the supply-chain system require changes to information flow and exchange. We undertake a case study of three automotive supply chains...

Providing a variety of attributes in products is an important way of attracting customers, but it often increases complexity and managerial cost. We drew on two data sets collected in the automotive sector to explore the link between external variety (the variety offered the customer) and...

When it comes to thinking about scale, the assumption of corporate leaders since Henry Ford's day has been that bigger is better. And in many situations, such thinking is inarguably correct because of the cost efficiencies that size provides. But sometimes efficiencies can mask opportunities. In...

Empirical work on order fulfillment strategies suggests that building products to customer order is an important driver of organizational value. Similarly, the experimental literature indicates that customers derive value from customization. The modeling literature provides a more equivocal...

Outsourcing initiatives are key to firm efforts to focus on core competencies, alter engrained practices and attain significant cost reductions in non-core processes. Extensive thought goes into the selection of outsourcing service providers, with the aim of enlisting vendors that have the...

As the auto industry moves into its second century, it suffers from low margins and a sclerotic value chain that cannot evolve with customer desires. Inventories of many weeks pile up on dealer lots and at distribution centers around the world while executives applaud marginal improvements in...