What form postponement? A typology and its implications on operational performance

Form postponement is increasingly drawing the attention of companies under the effect of escalating product variety. In its broadest meaning, form postponement implies deferring the time when some product differentiation activity, e.g. painting a car in different colors, is performed along a manufacturing and distribution process. The academic community has been promptly reacting to the heightened criticality of form postponement for the business community, multiplying research initiatives aimed at studying this topic. Unfortunately, a number of divergences can be found in the literature as to form postponement effects on operational performance at the company level of analysis. To disentangle this puzzle, we define three, mutually exclusive and exhaustive types of form postponement and classify literature findings into these types. By identifying effects that are specific to each form postponement type, we unify into a coherent picture the whole body of literature on the operational implications of form postponement, thus making past research findings more accessible to practitioners.