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Product Variety Management

Research Advances

  • Book
  • © 1998

Overview

Editors:
  1. Teck-Hua Ho

    1. Anderson School at UCLA, USA

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    You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

  2. Christopher S. Tang

    1. Anderson School at UCLA, USA

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    You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

Part of the book series: International Series in Operations Research & Management Science (ISOR, volume 10)

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Table of contents (10 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xix
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  2. Markets and Product Variety Management

    • Kelvin Lancaster
    Pages 1-18

  3. Variety: From the Consumer’s Perspective

    • Barbara Kahn
    Pages 19-37

  4. Product Structure, Brand Width and Brand Share

    • Juin-Kuan Chong, Teck-Hua Ho, Christopher S. Tang
    Pages 39-64

  5. Value of Postponement

    • Seungjin Whang, Hau Lee
    Pages 65-84

  6. Designing Task Assembly and Using Vanilla Boxes to Delay Product Differentiation: An Approach for Managing Product Variety

    • Jayashankar M. Swaminathan, Sridhar R. Tayur
    Pages 85-102

  7. Design for Variety

    • Mark Martin, Warren Hausman, Kosuke Ishii
    Pages 103-122

  8. Customer Preferences, Supply-Chain Costs, and Product-Line Design

    • Fangruo Chen, Jehoshua Eliashberg, Paul Zipkin
    Pages 123-144

  9. Profit-Optimizing Product Line Design, Selection and Pricing with Manufacturing Cost Consideration

    • Candace Yano, Gregory Dobson
    Pages 145-175

  10. Managing Product Variety

    • Karl Ulrich, Taylor Randall, Marshall Fisher, David Reibstein
    Pages 177-205

  11. Managing Variety in Software Features

    • Mayuram S. Krishnan, Sunder Kekre, Tridas Mukhopadhyay, Kannan Srinivasan
    Pages 207-225

  12. Back Matter

    Pages 227-233
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Keywords

About this book

Product proliferation has become a common phenomenon. Most companies now offer hundreds, if not thousands, of stock keeping units (SKUs) in order to compete in the market place. Companies with expanding product and service varieties face with problems of obtaining accurate demand forecasts, controlling production and inventory costs, and providing high quality and good delivery performance for the customers. Marketing managers often advocate widening product lines for increasing revenue and market share. However, the breadth of product line can also decrease the efficiency of manufacturing processes and distribution systems. Thus firms must weigh the benefits of product variety against its cost in order to determine the optimal level of product variety to offer to their customers. Academics and practitioners are interested in several fundamental questions about product variety. For instance, why do companies extend their product lines? Do consumers care about product variety? Will a brand with more variety enjoy higher market share? How should product variety be measured? How can a company exploit its product and process design to deliver a higher level of product variety quickly and cheaply? What should the level of product variety be and what should the price of each of the product variants be? What kind of 'challenges would a company face in offering a high level of product variety and how can these obstacles be overcome? The solutions to these questions span multiple functions and disciplines.

Editors and Affiliations

  • Anderson School at UCLA, USA

    Teck-Hua Ho, Christopher S. Tang

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