An approach for steering products and services offering variety towards economic and environmental sustainability

Customers’ individual preferences are calling for greater variety of firms’ offerings. Faced with this situation, firms endeavour to meet customer requirements while reducing their costs and impact on the environment to remain competitive. The attainment of these goals entails various issues that must be addressed including multiple performance drivers and criteria relating to environmental and economic sustainability and variety. Accordingly, trade-offs must be defined and balanced among such heterogeneous criteria to facilitate the decision-making process on a variety of levels regarding environmental and economic sustainability. These trade-offs should involve decision makers to reflect the firm's priorities and consider its business field. This paper proposes an approach supporting the decision-making process on offering variety to the market while considering environmental and economic sustainability criteria. More specifically, the approach uses economic and environmental performance indicators and inputs from decision makers to determine the variety of the offering to meet a given demand. The paper highlights the impact of variety steering on environmental and economic sustainability indicators.