Introduction to operations architecture for complexity management in product design and operations

Manufacturing firms have been trying to develop high variety of products to cope with continuously changing customer requirements in marketplace. However, the demand for high variety of products generates inefficiencies which is called complexity (or complexity cost) in operations. Although some studies tried to see the complexity in overall viewpoint, the relationship between design and operations phase is not structurally taken into account. In this paper, operations architecture (OA) is introduced which is a tool for describing the structure and the relationship between design and operations phase to manage the variety-induced complexity. Using the OA, complexity sources considered at the previous studies are newly classified based on the four domains in the architecture. From the result of classification, the authors identified that the complexity sources are not only staying in a domain but propagating their impacts to other domains. Then, applicability of the OA is discussed showing three applications.

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