Sponsor:

National Science Foundation

Research Team:

Scott J. Mason, Ricki Ingalls, Kim LaScola Needy

Universities Involved:

Oklahoma State University

Start Date:

08/01/07

End Date:

07/31/09

Summary:

This project develops a software that determines how robust supply chain is to product changes, determines the importance of product design and supply chain on product’s success / profits, and shows differences of sequential vs. simultaneous product design and supply chain design
This project addresses the problem of how to effectively synchronize product design (PD) and supply chain (SC) design for new and existing products resulting in not only a good PD, but a SC that is cost effective, minimizes lead time and ensures quality. It investigates the impacts of PD and redesign on the SC structure with an aim of quantifying those impacts so that they can be used in the PD phase to better understand the tradeoffs between the benefits and costs of different SC alternatives. This is a collaborative research effort between the Center for e-Design (CED) and the Center for Engineering Logistics and Distribution (CELDi).
In this research, we identify the important correlation between product design and supply chain design. For these two designs, inteasd of using sequential approach as mostly used in reality, we also define simulteneous approach, by which the optimization considers both designs at the same time. In this work, we incorporate two optimization and one simulation models.