| Supplier selection is a critical part of supply chain management. Companies not only need to decide whether to "make" or "buy", but they also need to be able to differentiate among potential suppliers in order to improve supply chain performance. These decisions should be integrated into the product design phase due to the bidirectional implications of product structure and the associated supply chain.;Despite the importance of this bi-directional interaction, prior research on this topic focuses on the production stage, and only a few studies consider the supplier selection problem during product design and most of the studies start considering supply chain at the detail design stage, which is the latest stage of product design. Accordingly, there is a need to further explore this issue.;In this research, a graph theory-based methodology is presented to connect and integrate product design and supply chain design decisions. It begins with product design functions that analyzes the functional requirements of a product, generates design concepts, evaluates assemblability of design concepts and modularizes them as possible product architectures in a design repository. Product architecture serves as a bridge connecting product functions, components, and suppliers. Then, the supply chain performances of these design concepts are comprehensively analyzed under different levels of modularity and supply chain scenarios.;With actual data from an industrial company, this study shows that incorporating supply chain considerations during product design stage significantly improves the cost and time performance. In addition, the impact of different levels of modularity on supply chain performance is validated. Hence, the supply chain performance can be improved by re-modularization of the product or re-arrangement of part of the supply chain network. The centralized and decentralized supply chain scenario analyses provide insights to enterprises within the supply chain. As a result, the optimization of supply chain and product design can be simultaneously accomplished during the conceptual design stage. |
