Managing product complexity

Profile of the focus group Managing product complexity

Companies are trying to meet increasingly heterogeneous and individual customer requirements and shorter technology cycles by increasing the number of variants. This leads to highly complex product programs, high internal costs and hereditary cross-subsidies within individual product groups, which is reflected in falling margins. Successful complexity management, and modular product kits in particular, can reduce internal variant diversity despite increasing product complexity without eliminating important external customer and market requirements. At the same time, the current progress in digitalization offers enormous potential to support the underlying market, product and process analyses.

The focus group "Managing Product Complexity" offers a platform for a cross-industry exchange of experience on the challenges and solutions in the context of complexity, variant and portfolio management with a focus on the topics of platform and modular design. Many topics of the focus group meetings are based on the well-known GiBWert process, which holistically describes the steps for implementing product and process toolkits, from market, product and process analysis to the identification of new innovations, modularization and toolkit definition. By discussing best practices, methods and tools, cross-industry solutions for the future design of complexity, variant and portfolio management are jointly discussed and developed.