Integrating Sustainability Considerations into Product Variety and Portfolio Management

Abstract

Customers today desire more individualized products and services. As a consequence, the market must deal with a significant increase in a variety of offerings to satisfy this changing customer demands. This rapidly increasing variety affects operations complexity of manufacturers and subsequently costs and environmental impact. Consequently, companies need to better understand and find innovative ways to unleash a variety of benefits as well as driving down costs and environmental impacts. This paper reports on a research conducted within the Thomas Jefferson project SUSTAIN aiming to innovatively integrate environmental sustainability in practitioners’ decisions, on a win-win basis. More specifically, a general framework is shaped in a view to support the integration of sustainability considerations into the management of product variety and portfolio. The framework development relies on variety and portfolio management, and product configurators. Relevant background literature has been analyzed and the framework is described and discussed.