Postponement

Postponement refers to efforts to customize products for delivery as late in the production process as possible. It supports the just-in-time principle from the Toyota Production System. Postponement relies on modular design, common components, quick deployment of manufacturing resources, and cost-effective customization that occurs as late in the production cycle as possible. 

Without commonality, plants may be efficient as far as individual products are concerned. However, total cost — including inventory and shipping — will be high due to proliferation of specialized parts and finished goods inventory. 

The separation increases variability. This arises because fluctuations in the two end products are likely to be greater than fluctuations in the combination. If a way could be found to both shorten lead-time and make the total system less susceptible to off-target forecasts, the whole system would be better off. 

Another case study is the make-to-order sandwich shop. Multiple variations are created from a few basic modules. In this case, the component modules are bread, turkey, ham, roast beef, lettuce, onions, and a few others. These are combined into made-to-order products according to customer preference. 

A modular product design will have a significant effect on the supply chain operations needed to serve the market. Paint stores are examples of postponement and its effect on operations in the store. Stores equipped 

Postponement is a strategy that delays customization of a product until the latest possible point downstream in the supply chain, often by restructuring the supply chain. This implies that the product is partially produced ex ante, and customized ex post. Postponement decreases the finished goods inventory, without compromising 

However, to implement postponement, companies need to restructure the supply chain - redesign the product and realign the manufacturing and delivery processes. The supply chain must be capable of supplying the basic product to the customization facilities, and it must be able to deliver the finished customized goods to customers quickly. As we discuss next, the modularization of products and processes makes it easier, in a relative sense, to restructure a supply chain (Fine and Whitney 1996 Fine et al. 2005). 

The HP s narrative on postponement is well-known to many. They used the notion of core plus peripherals , which is a variation of modular design. HP built a core printer with a large number of common modules that did not vary with customers. They also created peripheral components, each with specific functionality, that could be assembled to the core at the distribution centers or at customer sites. This allowed HP to postpone customization of printers for its European customers, who needed multiple language support. Lucent Technology used the same principle for successfully bidding on a Saudi contract. By building the core in advance of the order, they could satisfy a stringent delivery time constraint in the Saudi contract (Hoyt et al. 2007 Chakravarty 2010). 

HP had to make trade-off decisions in its supply chain. These decisions affected product and process design. The company found that the lowest manufacturing cost for a particular product might be achieved by creating an assembly of specialized parts. This meant that each product had unique parts that could only be used in that product. There was no attempt at achieving parts commonality across products. 

A modular product design will affect the operations needed to serve the market. Feitzinger and Lee point to paint stores as good examples of postponement and its effect on operations in the store. Stores equipped with a low-cost chromatograph can analyze paint chips. Then the store can blend generic colors to achieve an exact match. This contrasts with the possible need to carry each color as a separate product. 

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The end of field life is often determined by the lowest reservoir pressure which can still overcome all the pressure drops described and provide production to the stock tank. As the reservoir pressure approaches this level, the abandonment conditions may be postponed by reducing some of the pressure drops, either by changing the choke and separator pressure drops as mentioned, or by introducing some form of artificial lift mechanism, as discussed in Section 9.7. 

Having the Slater atomic orbitals, the linear combination approximation to molecular orbitals, and the SCF method as applied to the Fock matrix, we are in a position to calculate properties of atoms and molecules ab initio, at the Hartree-Fock level of accuracy. Before doing that, however, we shall continue in the spirit of semiempirical calculations by postponing the ab initio method to Chapter 10 and invoking a rather sophisticated set of approximations and empirical substitutions... 

In the pioneer work of Foster the correction due to film thinning had to be neglected, but with the coming of the BET and related methods for the evaluation of specific surface, it became possible to estimate the thickness of the adsorbed film on the walls. A number of procedures have been devised for the calculation of pore size distribution, in which the adsorption contribution is allowed for. All of them are necessarily somewhat tedious and require close attention to detail, and at some stage or another involve the assumption of a pore model. The model-less method of Brunauer and his colleagues represents an attempt to postpone the introduction of a model to a late stage in the calculations. 

Measurements are made using appropriate equipment or instruments. The array of equipment and instrumentation used in analytical chemistry is impressive, ranging from the simple and inexpensive, to the complex and costly. With two exceptions, we will postpone the discussion of equipment and instrumentation to those chapters where they are used. The instrumentation used to measure mass and much of the equipment used to measure volume are important to all analytical techniques and are therefore discussed in this section. 

Although the right-hand sides of Eqs. (8.27) and (8.28) are the same, the former applies to the mixture (subscript mix), while the latter applies to the mixing process (subscript m). The fact that these are identical emphasizes that in Eq. (8.27) we have calculated only that part of the total entropy of the mixture which arises from the mixing process itself. This is called the configurational entropy and is our only concern in mixing problems. The possibility that this mixing may involve other entropy effects—such as an entropy of solvation-is postponed until Sec. 8.12. 

The phenomena are quite complex even for pipe flow. Efforts to predict the onset of instabiHty have been made using linear stabiHty theory. The analysis predicts that laminar flow in pipes is stable at all values of the Reynolds number. In practice, the laminar—turbulent transition is found to occur at a Reynolds number of about 2000, although by careful design of the pipe inlet it can be postponed to as high as 40,000. It appears that linear stabiHty analysis is not appHcable in this situation. 

In the United States, fibers and injection mol ding are the main appHcations for polypropylene (Table 8), followed by film. In Europe and Japan, injection mol ding appHcations predominate (Table 10). This market area is more likely to decline in economic recession, as consumers postpone purchases of apphances and automobiles. Film appHcations are important in both regions, but fibers are a much less important use for polypropylene in Japan than in other developed regions. The heavy use of polypropylene nonwovens in the manufacture of disposable diapers and similar products, and the wide use of polypropylene carpets in the United States, account for the greater consumption of fibers. 

If scratches and breaks occur in the zinc layers by accidental damage - which is certain to occur when the sheets are erected - then the zinc will cathodically protect the iron (see Fig. 24.4) in exactly the way that pipelines are protected using zinc anodes. This explains the long postponement of rusting. But the coating is only about 0.15 mm thick, so after about 30 years most of the zinc has gone, rusting suddenly becomes chronic, and the roof fails. 

If the reaction mixture does not solidify during the heating, it is well to work it up at once while it can still be poured from the flask. Otherwise the work-up can be postponed to the next day. If the reaction mixture is too difficult to remove from the flask, the acid-ice slurry can be added all at once to the reaction flask immersed in ice. The vigorous surface decomposition is thus partly quenched. However, the cake is seldom difficult to remove unless polyhalogenation has occurred. 

Try to avoid bolting on continuous improvement, rather make it an int ral part of the systems you put in place. If it is bolted on, it is probably not essential for day-to-day management and could quickly be ignored. For example, you might decide that the overall system will be reviewed every two years to identify improvement opportunities this can too easily be postponed, forgotten or abandoned. Instead, the system should be designed to identify weaknesses and improvement opportunities at any time. In other words, continuous improvement must be built-in. 

Aufschichtung,/. piling up stratification, aufschieben, v.t. put off, postpone, suspend push open push on. 

Aufschub, m. putting off, delay, postponement, aufschuren, v.t. stir up, poke up, stoke. Aufschuttdichte, /. apparent density, aufschutteln. v.t. shake up, shake, aufschutten, v.t. put on, pour on charge lay up, store up. 

Photog.) restrainer (VaTniah) reducer, verzogem, v.t. retard delay, postpone. Verzogerung,/. retardation delay, postponement lag. 

It is at this stage that, having the information above, a decision can be made on which planned maintenance tasks are to be carried out and which may be postponed or cancelled. This may be due either to insufficient resources (e.g. man-hours or a forthcoming planned shutdown) or planned maintenance that need not be carried out for another reason. 

In view of the widespread use of welded joints in equipment and structures exposed to corrosion, it is necessary to know whether such welded joints will demonstrate satisfactory resistance to attack. It is not necessary to include welded specimens of all materials in a preliminary study to discover which of them have satisfactory resistance to a particular environment. Weld tests can be postponed until the preliminary selection has been made, or, alternatively, those materials expected in advance to be most likely to be resistant can be exposed in the welded condition so as to expedite the final answer. 

In Fig. 69 we have been considering a pair of solute particles in pure solvent. We shall postpone further discussion of this question until later. In the meantime we shall review the Coulomb forces in very dilute ionic solutions as they are treated in the Debye-Hiickel theory. 

Several metals that are farther removed from the noble gases in the periodic table form positive ions. These include the transition metals in Groups 3 to 12 and the post-transition metals in Groups 13 to 15. The cations formed by these metals typically have charges of +1, +2, or +3 and ordinarily do not have noble-gas structures. We will postpone to Chapter 4 a general discussion of the specific charges of cations formed by these metals. 

The answer to this question favored by the present author is postponed for the time being. 

All in all, this system is more complicated than the other flow batteries and this handicap postpones wider application. 

Immunizations are postponed during the administration of steroids, radiation therapy, and anti neoplastic (anticancer) drug therapy. 

On occasion, it may be necessary to postpone the regular immunization schedule, particularly for children. This is of special concern to parents. The decision to delay immunization because of illness or for other reasons must be discussed with the primary health care provider. However, the decision to administer or delay vaccination because of febrile illness (illness causing an elevated temperature) depends on the severity of the symptoms and the specific disorder. In general, all vaccines can be administered to those with minor illness, such as a cold virus and to those with a low-grade fever. However, moderate or severe febrile illness is a contraindication. hi instances of moderate or severe febrile illness, vaccination is done as soon as the acute phase of... 

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