Companies have found that delaying product differentiation is an effective means of reducing the costs of complexity resulting from increased product variety. In this paper, we develop models to study the impact of delaying product differentiation through standardization of the components and processes, and through re-sequencing the processes. We also develop models for the joint standardization and process sequence optimization problems. We show that the resulting integer programs can be solved optimally by linear programming-based algorithms.
By: Amit Garg and Hau L. Lee (Stanford Univ.)
Published in: RC20726 in 1997
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