Optimal formation of supplier networks for product design and production phases to realize an evolving product family

Due to rapid changes in customer requirements and vast improvements in technology, many product development companies have identified strategies like time-to-market (TTM) compression and product family development as critical for attaining success in today\u27s hyper-competitive markets. Compressing the TTM, to a large extent, is dependent on the suppliers and the project execution skills of the integrator companies. This study presents a methodology for selecting suppliers for two significant phases of the product realization process, namely, product design and production. The proposed methodology uses a two-stage approach for supplier selection where suppliers for product design are selected in the first stage and suppliers for production are selected in the second stage. These suppliers cater to the evolving customer requirements over a given planning horizon. Apart from using traditional supplier selection metrics such as cost and time, this study also considers the inter-supplier and supplier-integrator communication effectiveness --Abstract, page iv

Robust supplier set selection for changing product architectures

This research work proposes an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) based methodology for robust supplier selection by extending the robust engineering techniques to the supply chain domain. Supplier robustness, in the context of this paper, is defined a supplier ability to effectively cater to varying product architectures at minimum total component acquisition costs --Abstract, page iv