An empirical investigation into the barriers to postponement

The need for postponement is significantly driven by today's business and marketing environment. However, currently its applications are still not as widespread as expected. Therefore, this paper empirically investigates what factors hinder the adoption and implementation of postponement, and whether postponement applications are expected to increase in practice. Following a literature review on how to prompt and progress postponement applications, we present our research design. Namely, a questionnaire survey was conducted (by way of both post and e-mail) among 368 British manufacturing companies across four industrial sectors to help build statistical generalizations on the barriers to postponement. Then, we provide demographic data and response rate, and assess the reliability and validity of the survey instruments. The results from our questionnaire survey indicate that most of the highest ranked barriers were related to how a company manages its external networks (suppliers or customers), while those barriers related to distributors were put towards the bottom of the list. The respondents also expected postponement to be less used in three years. Finally, we draw some conclusions, determine limitations of this research and make suggestions for future research.