Increased product proliferation and global competition are forcing companies within the supply chain to adopt new strategies. Postponement is an effective strategy that allows companies to be agile and cost effective in dealing with the dynamics of global supply chains. Postponement centres around delaying activities in the supply chain until real information about the market is available, which reduces the complexity and uncertainty of dealing with a proliferation of products. A two-echelon divergent supply chain entailing a central production facility and N retailers facing stochastic demand is studied within the inventory-distribution system. A periodic review order-up-to strategy is incorporated at all echelons. Unique to the study, five different systems are created and the effectiveness of several postponement strategies (form and transshipment) under various operational settings are compared. The importance of postponement under an integrated supply chain context and its contribution to various sector implementations are also discussed. Simulation is used to analyze the performance of the systems especially with respect to cost, order lead time and the effectiveness of transshipment policies. The study is unique in determining factors that favour one system implementation over another and distinguishing sector requirements that support postponement. In the study, postponement is found to be an effective strategy in dealing with managing item variety, demand uncertainty and differences in review periods in the two echelon supply chain for different experimental settings.

Le système PLM est l’un des outils stratégiques de l’entreprise. Ces systèmes sont sujets à des changements récurrents dans l’entreprise. Les évolutions organisationnelles, le changement de l’offre produit ou encore le remplacement de logiciels PLM peuvent déclencher l’évolution du système d’information PLM. Une des structures les plus importantes dans les systèmes PLM est le modèle du produit, autour duquel s’articule les informations et processus. C’est autour du modèle produit que se concentrent nos recherches. Les causes d’évolution des modèles produits sont des éléments signifiants qui différencient les étapes de la démarche à suivre. Les méthodes d’IDM sont utilisées afin de formaliser la transformation des modèles. En plus, cette démarche bénéfice d’un cadre de similarité spécialement développé pour la configuration de produit. Un exemple industriel est illustré et résolu en appliquant cette démarche. Il s’agit de l’évolution d’un système gérant les modèles spécifiques de produit vers un système qui est capable de construire et d’utiliser les modèles génériques de produit. Un outil informatique support à nos travaux est développé dans le cadre d'Eclipse. / PLM systems are among the strategic components of enterprise’s information system architecture. These systems undergo frequent evolutions of enterprise. Organizational evolution or product offer variation as well as PLM application replacement may launch PLM systems’ evolution.One of the important structures in PLM systems is the product configuration, which organize and structure all product’s information and processes. Our research activities concern product model evolution. Reasons of product model evolution specify the appropriate methodology and necessary steps in order to handle it. MDE methods are used to formalize the model transformation process.Moreover, our methodology contains a specific similarity framework dedicated to product configuration. An industrial example was illustrated and resolved by this methodology. The problematic of this example is the migration of a system which manage only specific product configuration to a new system that is capable to construct and use generic models of product.

Diploma thesis is focused on project which will serve as a proposal for development of generic product for the company Teva Czech Industries s.r.o. Project management methods will be used in this work. Output of thesis is going to be a project plan which will be compiled using the functions of MS Project program. Several analyses such as risk analysis or source analysis are going to be part of other outputs.