How would you evaluate each of the variants as a customer?
Answers
Franck DANSAERT
VP at Capgemini Invent France - Head of Automotive
By the past, the multiplication of options generating product variants have to be avoided at any price : the resulting complexity having negative effects on offer lisibility, costs, lead-time or product quality. Marketing techniques have been developed to bundle options together based on customers preference analysis or more advanced techniques.
The today's trend is the maximum personalization of products and services, considering each customer and requirement as unique. This leads to an extraordinary proliferation of variants and raises of course the question of the opportunity to offer all of these variants in regards of their profitability, their customer value and, more generally, their attractivity for the customers. But the real issue here is less to decide whether or not a variant should be offered than how to help the customer to navigate across variants : the danger is to mislead the customer in too many choices. So, how to do that ? The proposed approach consists of combining value analysis and cost modelling techniques to develop optimized and personalized paths to navigate across options.