Decision Making Support to Steer Offering Variety During Production Planning

Customers’ individual preferences are calling for more variety of the firms offerings. Faced with this situation, firms endeavor to meet customer requirements while reducing their costs and impact on environment in order to remain competitive. Further on, achieving such a goal entails various issues that need to be tackled such as the multiple performance drivers and criteria relating to sustainability and variety. Accordingly, tradeoffs need to be defined and balanced between such heterogeneous criteria in order to facilitate the decision making process on variety levels with regards to sustainability impact. These tradeoffs should involve decision makers so as to reflect firm priorities and takes into account its realm. This paper proposes an approach supporting the decision making process on variety delivered to the market while taking into account sustainability criteria. More specifically, the approach uses performance indicators which are calculated by LCA based tools, then applies weightings, and finally computes the expected variety levels for a given demand data. The paper highlights the impact of variety steering on environmental and economic sustainability indicators.