Designing effective portfolio variety using customer need discrimination thresholds

Abstract

In order to develop a robust product portfolio one must first consider the needs of the market and create the ability to satisfy those needs through a good product architecture. To be successful, the link between a population's distribution of customer needs and the design of the product portfolio architecture created to address those needs must be understood. This thesis describes a method to determine which customer needs on a vehicle should have multiple levels offered to diversify the market coverage and in what order to expand the levels as more products are permitted in the portfolio. The methodology is formulated as a general optimization problem in which the number of levels on an . attribute is balanced against the constraints of multiple variants that can be accommodated through manufacturing. This optimization approach is used to design a platform for a sport utility vehicle and its supported product variants.