The rapidly changing business environment we work within challenges organizations to continuously adjust their product portfolio offerings to the ever changing needs of their customers, technology advances, and regulation.
ARGO-EFESO provides the tools and techniques for companies to swiftly and effectively optimize their portfolio. These techniques are proven and adaptable to a wide variety of industries and circumstances and are particularly appropriate when the required changes to the offering are significant. Five techniques are of particular importance: Open Innovation, Design Thinking, Standardization and Modularization, Product Architecture, and Vertical Integration.
A real situation that many companies face today is the realization that many products are shifting from traditionally mechanical features to electronic or software related solutions. If you take the cockpit of a car for example, many have evolved to a set of touch screens with electronic buttons that manage a multitude of functions that previously have been performed by mechanic means. Our portfolio management approach starts by developing a deep “empathy” with current and future users (given that elderly people and millennia drive cars with completely different backgrounds), describing and re-defining their experiential expectations through Design Thinking. The engineers utilize the empathy garnered through Design Thinking techniques to craft the user experience and translate them into needs that can be solved internally and those that cannot. For those problems that cannot be solved internally, the engineers describe them in technical terms so that they use open innovation to derive unique solutions. The internal and external answers are then laid out in such a way that they can be implemented in a modular form, so as to better manage the cost impact and time-to-develop of solution sets. Finally, the different engineering disciplines check where the new features can be standardized across products and/or platforms to leverage volume.
At ARGO-EFESO, we have defined pragmatic ways of working with our clients to effectively implement each one of the described components. Our goal is to make them part of your process landscape, handing over our knowledge to your internal specialists.