Many organizations have grown through mergers and acquisitions, which not only leads to organizational overlaps to be dealt with, but product-related overlaps that are often not addressed due to the market implications or technical difficulty in understanding what to do. But the clean-up and optimization of product portfolios is one of the most important operational integration of two companies in the industrial sector. We support organizations to leverage the M&A synergies in reduced material / purchasing costs, improved coverage of customer applications and closure of “white spots”.
The goal of Product Architecture is to define a global portfolio roadmap and savings potential for the current scope of offerings, that takes external and internal factors into consideration. The objective of FG complexity reduction is to define a winning product portfolio.
1. Product’s Basic Functions: Existing FG-portfolio structures and hierarchy (technical performance vs. type of product/application) are reviewed by studying data from the website, product configurator, ERP master data. Other processes include an overview of family designation and interviewing sales and engineering staff.
2. Outside-in Perspective: Gather architectures for main competitors / understand customers. We achieve this through analyzing competitors’ websites and completing interviews with distributors / agreed competition and with selected customers.
3. Dimensions & Values: During this stage we map all relevant dimensions / attributes that define products, map value space per dimension and define overlaps and proliferated products.
4. Portfolio Architecture & Map: Dimensions are grouped into hierarchy levels (family, product, variant). We then map products in the new product hierarchy and define overlaps and white spots. Finally, we assign each product family to quadrants.
5. Inside-out Perspective: We execute a technical classification of those products to be re-designed, defining operation’s targets for each product family and prepare an implementation plan.