Form postponement and operations strategy: a contingency theory

Form postponement is an operations design principle requiring that changes in product form occur at the latest possible point in time along a manufacturing and distribution process. The rich literature on form postponement almost ignores its market implications and often provides seemingly conflicting findings concerning its operational implications. In this paper, we argue that, to reconnect form postponement to the operations strategy discourse, four mutually exclusive and exhaustive types of form postponement should be distinguished based on their effect on product variety-related uncertainty affecting either the supplier or the customer.