نقش نقطه افتراق سفارش مشتری در تولید و مدیریت زنجیره تامین

In order to compete successfully, operations in any type of firm need to be strategically aligned to the market requirements. This concerns both manufacturing and supply chain operations. The customer order decoupling point (CODP) is getting increasing attention as an important input to the design of manufacturing operations as well as supply chains. This paper investigates the impact of the position and role of the CODP on issues of concern for production and supply chain management. The focus is on the design and strategic planning aspects of the supply chain, and the design of manufacturing planning and control systems. The paper proposes a dual design approach for production and supply chain planning systems; one type of system for operations upstream the CODP and another type of system for downstream operations in order to fully support the characteristics and objectives of each respective part of the supply chain.

In order to compete successfully, operations in any type of firm need to be strategically aligned to the market requirements. The motivation for this research is that companies are showing increasing interest in incorporating the customer order decoupling point (CODP) as an important input to the strategic design of manufacturing operations as well as supply chains. The CODP is the point in the material flow where the product is tied to a specific customer order; the basic choices being make-to-stock, assemble-to-order, make-to-order, and engineer-to-order. As a rule, the CODP coincides with the most important stock point, from where the customer order process starts. From a supply chain perspective, there is typically one dominant CODP along the entire supply chain flow. From a company perspective, the CODP can be positioned inside their manufacturing operations or it can be positioned at the suppliers (first tier or even further upstream in the supply chain), at the interface with the supplier (raw material inventory), at the border towards the customers (at some finished goods inventory), or even further downstream in the supply chain. This paper investigates the impact of the position and role of the customer order decoupling point on production and supply chain management. Issues that will be dealt with include the design and planning of manufacturing and supply chain operations. The purpose of the paper is to explore and develop a framework for an integrated perspective on production and supply chain management based on the CODP. The development of the framework in this paper is based on three types of research sources: a review of the related literature, a case study, and the results from an empirical survey of 128 Swedish manufacturing firms. First, a review is provided on the related literature on the customer order decoupling point and issues related to production and supply chain management that can be interpreted from a CODP perspective. Secondly, the case study and the survey results are presented. Then, the framework is presented and motivated.

This paper investigated the role of the CODP for production management and supply chain management issues. The focus of this paper has been the key role of the CODP in differentiating production or supply chain operations, by making a distinct decoupling of the operations upstream and downstream the CODP. Building on the models by Fisher [21], linking the choice of supply chain to the product type, and Berry and Hill [14], linking the choice of MPC system to the product type, and other related literature, a dual design approach for manufacturing and supply chain planning systems is proposed. The major insights from this study are twofold. Firstly, the production and supply chain management system has to be fitted to the task. This means that the systems design at the strategic, tactical as well as the operational level has to consider the position of the CODP. Secondly, the market requirements need to be transformed at the CODP. The CODP acts as a decoupling mechanism separating the customer order-driven activities from those that are forecast-driven. At the CODP the character of the operations change, such that another design strategy is required for the upstream part, wherefore the end-customer market requirements cannot be used as an input for the strategic planning of these operations. The “market” at the CODP has its own characteristics (such as competitive priorities) that the operations upstream the CODP have to acknowledge and address to successfully provide the right products in the right quantities at the right cost level at the CODP inventory position. With this in place, the downstream operations have the prerequisites for providing the marketplace with customized products in a timely and effective manner. These results are generally applicable to manufacturing and supply chain operations. For firms where there is only one type of decoupling situation, i.e. only MTO or only MTS, the firm can apply a single approach for designing the manufacturing and supply chain planning system. However, most firms tend to have a mix of MTO and MTS products, wherefore both types of systems need to be developed for different parts of the firm. Also, in ATO situations the two types of systems need to be applied to different parts of the supply chain for a single product line. The fact that the entire supply chain is not aligned towards one goal (i.e. the competitive priorities of the ultimate consumer) is not a dilemma. The important issue is to fit the planning and control approach to the task of each respective material flow—both upstream and downstream the CODP.