Product design for supply chain management means building products that thrive in and enhance your supply chain architecture. Simply "giving customers what they want", while fundamental to customer satisfaction, is rarely enough. Companies must be able to give customers the right products in the most resource-effective manner, without sacrificing quality or service. If your supplier, manufacturing, and post-sales support networks are being stressed to the breaking point, if your products require excessive inventories to maintain service levels, if your offerings aren't attracting new buyers in a saturated market, or if you need to reduce costs and complexity throughout your supply chain, designing products to take advantage of and strengthen your supply chain can provide extraordinary benefits.

This module, the final in our series on "Fundamentals of Supply Chain Management", will provide you with a powerful set of tools to achieve these goals. You will start by exploring three fundamental concepts: component commonality, modularity vs. integral design, and universality. A framework for costs and benefits will help you understand the value of these ideas and what to expect as you integrate them into your product design plans. You will see an excellent example of postponement, a strategy that can enhance service levels with lower inventories. You'll also learn how to quickly estimate the positive impact of a postponement strategy in your own company without analyzing sales data or using complex calculations. You will see examples of how postponement can be implemented through software, applied to product packaging, and even how it can help during a new product launch.

Product design is not the only place you can make improvements. The production process itself is often overlooked as an incredible opportunity for enhancement. Resequencing production operations, shifting the push-pull point, or even something as "simple" as administrative postponement can all provide significant benefits. Mass customization is often a hybrid of product and process design; finding ways to offer unique items with little or no additional lead time can increase market share and breathe new life into your products.

• Learn the opportunities presented by component commonality, modularity, and universality
• Understand how postponement can reduce inventories while maintaining service levels
• Discover supply chain enhancements available from process improvements

• 1. Component Commonality, Modularity, Modular vs. Integral Design

  General Electric

• 2. Universality
• 3. Framework for Costs and Benefits
• 4. Benefits of Design Changes

  Unilever

• 5. Postponement

  Hewlett-Packard

• 6. Postponement Costs and Benefits
• 7. Quick Estimate of Postponement Benefits
• 8. Packaging Postponement

  3Com

• 9. Postponement via Software

  Dell, General Motors

• 10. End-of-Life and New Product Situations
• 11. Process Design for Postponement

  Benetton

• 12. Mass Customization

  National Bicycle Company of Japan, adidas-Salomon, Timbuk2, Dell

• 13. Incentive Issues

  Hewlett-Packard

• 14. Conclusions
• 15. Test Your Knowledge