Does product design have an impact on supply chain management?

Some industry, like fashion and clothing, the trends of that are always set by consumers instead of the producers. Along with the customers demanding increasingly, they often require much more variety in products with lower price. Therefore, this requires the industry to focus more on product design. A good product design can help a company win a lot among numbers of competitors. However, this also put supply chain in a risky position since the product which is hot now, may no longer be hot when the product is actually made.

Based on the fact that the product life cycle is too short, matching demand with supply chain seems like becoming an essential issue. In this article, the author presented an example of UK clothing retailer Marks & Spencer, who realized how critical product design is in supply chain risk. The link of this article is http://www.husdal.com/2009/06/22/does-product-design-have-an-impact-on-supply-chain-risk/

All in all, we should understand that in some particular industries (or say in most industries), management people should not ignore how important of the product design is. We should never isolate the supply chain management with product design. The product development process should be m,ore agile, through communicating and collaborating in the supply chain.