Identifying Preferable Product Variants Using Similarity Analysis

Analyzing the sales process of many companies in the field of mechanical engineering leads to the conclusion that companies try to satisfy customer requirements at any price instead of offering standard or slightly modified variants to the customer. That would cause much less internal effort. As a result, exotic product variants are often sold unprofitably, since dissimilar products are, of course, more expensive than standard variants due to higher adjustment costs for their development. Until now there is no systematic approach that identifies and visualizes preferable variants for different segments which can be offered to the customer in order to set an anchor for the following configuration and detailing of the product variant. In this paper, a methodology is presented that allows companies to describe and visualize product variants from different perspectives in an integrated way based on similarities between product variants. The paper focuses on the identification and visualization of similarities between product variants and the determination of preferable product variants in different product segments. Similarities are identified with the help of features and specifications covering two major levels: the market level and the customer requirements level. Similarities between product variants are shown on each level by multidimensional scaling, which allows a simple visual evaluation.