Determination of a Customer Value-oriented Product Portfolio

Nowadays, manufacturing companies offer an increasing amount of product variants. Especially in B2B markets, product variety is taken for granted. Hence, existing variety management approaches focus exclusively on the variety implications. Certain approaches consider customer benefit when evaluating potential product variants. However, a targeted decision-making approach for adapting the variant quantity regarding the customer value does not exist. In this paper, a method is presented that accounts for changes in customer value as a function of the number of product variants offered. Thus, attributes that influence the customer value are identified and linked to the product variant quantity.