BUS606: Operations and Supply Chain Management

The recent literature offers several different views on the relation between the sustainability and complexity of manufacturing systems, including ASCs. For instance, Peralta et al. argue that it is necessary to establish new approaches that reduce increasing complexity of manufacturing systems in the design and management stage in order to promote their sustainability. For that purpose, they developed a so-called fractal model for sustainable manufacturing. Moldawska proposed a complexity-based model of sustainable manufacturing, assuming that sustainable manufacturing organization tends to maintain its own sustainability, as well as contribute to the sustainability of the world. Relations between supply chains and sustainability were also treated in works in which the authors analyzed the effect of distributed manufacturing systems on sustainability. The study explored the influence of mass customization strategy on the configuration complexity of assembly systems, and their authors proposed bounds for configuration complexity scale. ASCs in terms of mass customization can lead to very complex systems due to the high number of product variants. It has been proved that variety itself also has a significant impact on productivity, increased costs, and quality. Therefore, such companies need to consider integrating their business practices with sustainability and reducing supply chain costs to achieve a competitive advantage.