REDESIGNING PRODUCT PROGRAMS - FOCUSING ON VARIETY, COMPLEXITY AND COMMONALITY

Market demands have increased, and products’ market life spans get shorter. New products or new variants must be introduced more frequently than they used to. Thereby product assortments in companies are growing, which often leads to increased internal complexity. To handle this we are focusing on what we call a product program. A product program is a planned product portfolio for a company, which considers both internal and external impacts on the products. The intention is to keep or improve positive variety in the market, while changing negative variety into commonality to achieve internal benefits. A model to improve and redesign an existing product program has therefore been developed, and will be presented.