摘要
Supplier selection is one of the key decisions in the supply chain management. Most of the firms in a supply chain system have to make the "make" or "buy" decisions of components during product design phase. Outsourcing can reduce the product development time and cost, increase the external economy of scale, and help respond agilely to variability in demand. Despite its importance, however, most papers on this topic focus on the managerial issues, and only a few research papers consider the supplier selection problem from an engineering point of view. There is a need to further explore this issue. In this paper, we present a framework where the supply chain structure is investigated relative to the product architecture using graph theory. Product architecture is first formulated according to design repository and Decomposition Approach. Supplier selection issue is considered by evaluating the potential impacts of assembly and inventory decisions. The optimization of both product design and supply chain design can be simultaneously achieved during design stage. A case study in bike industry is presented to demonstrate the advantages of this method. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]