Organizational antecedents of form postponement: an empirical investigation

Form postponement (FP) is increasingly advocated as a solution for simultaneously meeting market demands for higher product variety and reducing inventory costs without sacrificing customer service. Yet despite these powerful benefits, FP applications are currently not as widespread as expected. Recent explorative surveys indicate that organizational problems may be a major obstacle to FP. Any in-depth study on the role of organizational variables in FP implementation, however, is still lacking. This paper empirically investigates what organizational factors can enable or inhibit FP and why it is so. Preliminary results from three cases in two manufacturing industries indicate that FP application can be influenced by a cross-functional approach to new product development, integration of production-planning tasks across multiple product families, integration between the marketing and operations departments in sales forecasts generation, workforce flexibility and adoption of coordination mechanisms that help reduce the administrative times in the order fulfillment process.