Coordinating product design, process design, and supply chain design decisions

Complementing Part A which appeared in an earlier issue, Coordinating product design, process design, and supply chain design decisions. Part B. coordinating approaches, tradeoffs, and future research directions introduces four additional papers that belong to this special issue. These four papers seek to provide answers to the following two questions: “What mechanisms allow product design, manufacturing process design, and supply chain design decisions to be coordinated?” and “Why should decisions with respect to product design, manufacturing process design, and supply chain design be coordinated?” Each of the four papers compiled in Part B provides, foremost, an approach to coordinate decisions across the domains of product design, manufacturing process design, and supply chain design. The proposed coordinating mechanisms range from a network-based modeling approach to an assessment procedure for evaluating product architectures to the integration of relevant suppliers into the new product development (NPD) process to a goal programming modeling approach. The fourth paper in Part B, in fact, deploys the proposed goal programming modeling approach to identify and formalize the potential tradeoffs among decisions across the three domains. Part B completes the special issue by identifying future research opportunities, beyond those highlighted within the seven papers that form Part A and Part B of this special issue on Coordinating product design, process design, and supply chain design decisions.