Assembly postponement

Assembly postponement refers to maintaining a product in a given state for as long as possible and customizing it after demand is realized. Thus, a set of products is replaced by a common platform product that is manufactured and customized only after demand is realized. Such an approach is also called design for logistics. This approach involves designing the product to reduce supply chain costs. 

There are many other examples of assembly postponement. The salad bar at a restaurant is a classic example of making the customer assemble their desired salad on demand. Hardware stores claim to carry over 30,000 colors of paint. But in most cases they carry only a small number of primary colors and additives and create the color on demand with the aid of software. Such assembly postponement permits lowering of supply chain costs while maintaining customer choice. 

Thus, an important question for an existing supply chain is Can assembly postponement, through product design changes, enable supply chain improvement ... 

Deliver process is deliver make-to-order product Change deliver process to deliver make-to-order product (e.g. warehousing of unfinished products and components for fast assembly postponement)... 

Groups Denounce Dickey Water Bill, Los Angeles Limes, June 16, 1949 Hanson, Water Pollution Action Postponed. Full text of the statement of opposition was printed in the Assembly Journal, June 16, 1949, pp. 4585-4586. League of Cities and sewage treatment funding E. Cray, Chief Justice (Simon Schuster, New York, 1997), pp. 169-170. 

An excellent example of postponement is the mixing of paint colors at the retail store. Rather them having to forecast the exact colors that consumers will want to buy, the retailer mixes paint in any color the consumer wishes to acquire at the time of purchase. Other examples include color pemels in the front of built-in kitchen appliances that enable the same unit to be any one of a number of colors the centialization of slow-selling products in one warehouse location tmd the assembly of slow-moving items only tifter orders have been received. 

Designing for postponements makes the concept easier to implement. These designs create needed commonality among end products. Assembling common... 

Beyond these causes, wear and tear during normal system operation, human operator errors, postponed maintenance, or a faulty design of a system component, or errors in the assembly of system components from different engineering domains may result in gradually or suddenly occurring faults with possibly disastrous consequences. 

Our conclusion is that DFT techniques must move back into the supply chain to have the greatest impact. Dealing with final assembly, particularly in a complex supply chain, is the tip of the iceberg. The roots should spread backward into the supply base to have the greatest impact. This also includes design for commonality to maximize the potential for postponement. 

Postponement A product or supply chain design strategy that shifts product differentiation closer to the end-user. The approach encompasses identity changes such as assembly or packaging. (Adapted from APICS Dictionary, 10th edition)... 

This method is a postponed wet-assembly process and is usually unsuitable for non-porous adherends. It is applicable to adhesives that can be reactivated by solvents unlike most two-part adhesives. Solvent activation... 

In one of its final assembly factories, Maxtor Corporation offers a component-level product. Hard Disk Drive (HDD), to its customers for further assembly of desktop PCs, high-end servers, consumer electronics products, network attached storage (NAS) server appliances, etc. (see www.maxtor.com). Maxtor has partnership-based B2B relationships with its customers. In this setting, customer orders are not given as specific order quantities and order due dates. Instead, only the total order quantity in each week is specified with permitted minimum and maximum quantity limits. In its order promising and fulfillment processes, Maxtor does not postpone customer orders to later weeks (i.e. no backorders), but it may deny customer orders subject to liability and/or penalties. While customer orders are promised weekly, the order fulfillment process is executed daily to provide accurate resource utilization and production schedules (see Ali, et al. 1998). 

Polymer networks which can memorize the orientational order of the nematic liquid crystal environment where they are assembled [71], [72], [73], [74] are particularly attractive because of their potential for a variety of electrooptic technologies. We postpone this subject to the last section and here concentrate our attention on the ordering and structures of these composite materials. These systems have many physical properties analogous to liquid crystals confined to different submicrometer-sized cavities [75], [76] and random porous matrices [77], [78], Large surface-to-volume ratios enable a strong influence of the polymer network on nematic ordering in the liquid crystalline solvent and thus govern optical properties of the composites. 

Postpone the final configuration/assembly/distribution of products... 

Often this can be achieved by postponing the final configuration or assembly of the product until the actual customer requirement is known - a strategy pursued by Dell and Hewlett Packard, for example. 

One strategy that is increasingly being adopted is the idea of postponement discussed earlier in this book. Postponement, or delayed configuration, is based on the principle of seeking to design products using common platforms, components or modules but where the final assembly or customisation does not take place until the final market destination and/or customer requirement is known. 

Final assembly of this detector will occur at the AGS in the fall of 1990. Actual loading of the aerogel, however, may be postponed until just before the run starts in March, 1991. 

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