Postponement refers to a strategy which intentionally delays supply chain activities until the demand is known. Postponement decreases safety stock and the holding cost, while also incurring some additional costs. The main focus of this study is packaging postponement which is recommended if only the packaging of products destined at multiple retailers are different. This thesis summarizes research that exclusively studied packaging postponement and presents a decision support system that determines which postponement strategy, i.e., full, partial (tailored), or no postponement, is optimal. The decision support system is a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model with the objective of minimizing total costs, including the holding cost and the additional cost, and is constrained by the limited capacity of packaging production at a distribution center and the integrity of variables. In this research, the impact of various factors on optimal packaging postponement strategy is also analyzed. To sum up, this research provides a collection of research papers that exclusively studied packaging postponement and presents a decision support model for packaging postponement.
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