Released: Friday, September 25, 2015
Gaining market share and staying profitable for an enterprise is like running a marathon where one needs to plan, focus, and execute session by session in order to win the race at the end of the day. However, in this era of hyper-competition and saturation of traditional services, the Product Management group is often being pushed to innovate and launch new products and services at an even faster rate to stay ahead of the game. Product managers are either augmenting existing products or launching products, thereby increasing the product mix as they are pushed to win races quite often. As a consequence, the product portfolio is becoming heavier, wider, and deeper, though at the same time, many of the products in the portfolio only meet the short-term objective and not the longer-term objective of an enterprise. The value add products become value-cost products over a period of time.
Therefore it becomes imperative to prune the product mix and carry out product rationalization in an enterprise. Product rationalization can be defined as a business activity of identifying and eliminating obsolete products, product lines, product features and variants, thereby significantly aiding the realization of enterprise goals and objectives. In this activity decisions are taken to either keep a product active or suspended, or removed from the portfolio, thereby rationalizing the product mix.
From a consulting perspective, this white paper attempts to answer the two following questions:
- What are the drivers of product rationalization and what are its key considerations?
- How to get started and carry out product rationalization, leveraging a business metric-driven framework approach?
From an implementation perspective, this white paper can even be considered as a ‘short guidebook’ which provides detailed implementation steps on how to carry out product rationalization by considering multiple financial and non-financial factors supported with case-lets.
Authors:
Manish Juneja, Principal Consultant in Energy, Communications, and Services business unit at Infosys
Parnika Roychoudhury, Project Manager in Energy, Communications, and Services business unit at Infosys
