The manufacturers should be giving the dealers guidance on what to stock and order based on their global visibility into sales and customer buying trends. Customers buy combinations of features, and they do this in predictable ways. Detecting and using the patterns can make inventory turn faster, even if, technically, it doesn’t exist.
First order take rates tell us about the relative popularity of different options. For example, consider a small set of possible pizza toppings.
Topping
Take Rate
Pepperoni
40%
Mushrooms
20%
Pineapple
3%
Canadian Bacon
3%
Green Peppers
10%
Customer buying patterns really start with second order take rates, which tell us about pairs of options, or toppings. Second order take rates tell us about relative [...]
If a product is too complex, where is the complexity coming from? Which features are causing the explosion in the number of build combinations? The stairway to complexity tells us where to look.
The stairway to complexity shows how the number of unique configurations drops as features are removed. Here is another stairway for a [...]
Product complexity is driven by large number of options. Companies struggle to determine which feature choices are driving complexity. They typically “randomly cut choices” to streamline and rationalize SKUs. The cost of product complexity is tremendous on engineering. The current PLM systems do not have a method to measure this and provide intelligent feedback to engineers on how to standardize platforms to reduce engineering and maintenance costs.
This article clearly details the metrics around product complexity and how to solve this issue.
The number of build combinations depends on which features are included. The build combinations is the product mix or the marketing mix. Understanding this is important as product complexity is a key driver of process complexity.
A product is a collection of features, and each feature has mutually exclusive options. If a feature has only two options, then the choice is like a coin toss. The information contained in that choice is measured by entropy.
Entropy is a concept from classical thermodynamics that deals with the amount of disorder in a [...]
Self service is a term we all know, such as pay-at-the-pump gas and self-checkout stations at some grocery stores, and now more obscure things like video game kiosks by GameFly, but the true tidal wave of self-service hasn’t even started, and it’s going to be good for both the consumer and the manufacturer, if done [...]
