Modularity Metric in Reconfigurable Supply Chain
Abstract
Confronted with an increasingly uncertain and fluctuating economic environment characterized by a technological evolution driven by industry 4.0 concepts, companies have to adapt their supply chains in order to improve its competitiveness. They must also implement strategies that allows them to deal with these new challenges. Supply chain modularity offers the opportunity to change and reorganize the structure of the supply chain to meet changing market needs. In this paper, we propose a new framework to design a modular supply chain using Design Structure Matrix and a modularity measurement in Reconfigurable Supply Chain. We also show the importance of integrating the direction of flows, i.e. inbound and outbound flows in the calculation of modularity and, in particular, its impact on lead time. Finally, an illustrative example is developed to validate the proposed measurement.