| In increasingly dynamic and fragmented market segments, global enterprises face increased pressure of offering greater product variety to support diverse requirements of discerning and demanding customers. A high rate of technological change in these dynamic and fragmented global markets has resulted in a trend toward a greater level of product variety, progressively shortening product life cycles and sharply rising development costs. Therefore, the notion of “reusable assets” (i.e., standardized and reusable) in all segments of the value chain from concept to market has become important in achieving synergy between product development strategy and supply chain management.; In this research, a comprehensive decision support model has been developed to simultaneously determine global product strategy and global supply chain configuration. The proposed model is a combination of the product configuration problem (which includes module option alternative development) and capacitated network problem with fixed charge on arcs. While the proposed model is NP-Hard, it is shown that successively solving single module product configuration on capacitated network problems obtains optimal solutions, if manufacturing configuration could be preprocessed outside of the model.; Scenario analysis has been performed to gain insights into the extent to which platform approach is influenced by market conditions and existing global supply chain structure. Model parameters are generated to resemble the global automobile industry as closely as possible. Solutions of scenarios are then compared to each other in terms of cost performance and platformability performance. |
