Matching Product Architecture and Supply Network - Systematic Review and Future Research

Manufacturing firms concentrate on their core competences to prevail in fierce competition. This concentration lead manufacturing firms to shift large shares of their value creation to their suppliers. As a result, the supply network drives the economic performance of manufacturing firms through three measures; individual performance of suppliers (1), their arrangement and the structure of the supply network (2), as well as the matching between the supply network and the product architecture (3). As literature provides numerous approaches to support (1) and (2), the paper at hand focuses on the matching between product architecture and supply network on the level of architectural attributes. This paper provides a systematic review on approaches for the matching between the product architecture and the supply network within product development. The elaborated overview allows a distinct classification of approaches and the elaboration of future research.