Product Families and Platforms Diversification: Customer Expectations, Product Variations, or Self-competition?

Abstract Today's automotive market is a highly competitive industry as many global manufacturing enterprises are competing to increase and dominate more market shares. Automotive and other major manufacturers must focus on three points: product diversification to satisfy customer demands, increase market share globally and domestically, and reduce design and manufacturing cost. Enterprises must understand current and future customer expectations as perceptions evolve overtime. Product platform and products family strategies have been implemented widely to offer variations. Assessing diversification in product platforms and product families is a tool used to support and create the most effective balance between market demands and product diversifications. Redundancy in product features, functions, and options generates self-competition. The focus of this research is to identify the ultimate number of product platforms of existing and prospective products of an enterprise. The proposed mathematical model will introduce indexes to evaluate current products diversification and degree of diversification, With respect to market share, The Indexes are designed to identify the appropriate number of product platforms needed for the market to reduce cost and increase revenue. The developed mathematical model is demonstrated and validated using case studies from actual industry data.

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