Abstract
Products and processes are the fundamental building blocks of a company’s operations, and they play a major role in determining the competitive positioning of a company. A product can be conceptualized as a bundle of attributes. Each such bundle is a version of the product and, the set of versions of a product offered by a manufacturing company is the product-variety. While the attributes of quality and customization are stipulated by the customer, others such as technology, manufacturing processes, components, logistics, and postponement are controlled by the manufacturer along with the distributor and retailer. Product realization requires processes: manufacturing, and services. They are the steps by which value is added to satisfy the expectations of customers. Processes transform inputs (actions, methods, and operations) into outputs (products). They interact with other processes in the supply chain, as outputs from one process become the inputs to another. Each process is therefore part of a larger process.
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Chakravarty, A.K. (2014). Products and Processes. In: Supply Chain Transformation. Springer Texts in Business and Economics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41911-9_3
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