Abstract
Customers’ individual preferences are calling for greater variety of firms’ offerings. Faced with this situation, firms endeavour to meet customer requirements while reducing their costs and impact on the environment to remain competitive. The attainment of these goals entails various issues that must be addressed including multiple performance drivers and criteria relating to environmental and economic sustainability and variety. Accordingly, trade-offs must be defined and balanced among such heterogeneous criteria to facilitate the decision-making process on a variety of levels regarding environmental and economic sustainability. These trade-offs should involve decision makers to reflect the firm's priorities and consider its business field. This paper proposes an approach supporting the decision-making process on offering variety to the market while considering environmental and economic sustainability criteria. More specifically, the approach uses economic and environmental performance indicators and inputs from decision makers to determine the variety of the offering to meet a given demand. The paper highlights the impact of variety steering on environmental and economic sustainability indicators.
Highlights
The increasing customer demand for tailored solutions compels firms to seek customer satisfaction more effectively, broadening the conventional focus on productivity to integrate customer expectations and satisfaction
– Comprehensive: indicators should cover a given solution space consisting of a product mix and its related processes and supply chain, and it should span over a life cycle perspective;
Notwithstanding, this allows a focus on the other indicators of cost and environmental dimensions because the variation in selling prices would impact the decision of the manager regarding variety steering
Summary
The increasing customer demand for tailored solutions compels firms to seek customer satisfaction more effectively, broadening the conventional focus on productivity to integrate customer expectations and satisfaction This has led to more customer-centred strategies in both Business to Customer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B) contexts, including Mass Customization (MC) and Product–Service Systems (PSS). Customers’ individual preferences are calling for more variety of firms’ offerings in terms of products and services Under these circumstances, firms endeavour to meet diversified customer demands while reducing their internal costs and impact on the environment to remain competitive. Trade-offs must be defined and balanced between such heterogeneous criteria to facilitate the decision-making process on variety levels regarding the environmental and economic sustainability impact. This paper proposes a model supporting the decision-making process on various solutions delivered to the market while considering environmental and economic sustainability criteria.
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