Title: Sequencing platform derivatives under operational and market constraints

Authors: Emmanuel D. Adamides; Dimitrios P. Koumanakos; Vasilis Hadjipandelis

Addresses: Section of Management and Organisation Studies, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics, University of Patras, Rion 26500, Greece ' Section of Management and Organisation Studies, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics, University of Patras, Rion 26500, Greece ' Section of Management and Organisation Studies, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics, University of Patras, Rion 26500, Greece

Abstract: Although there has been considerable amount of research on the design of product platforms, not much research has been pursued on how to exploit platform designs in changing business environments. Related to the latter issue is the problem of planning the sequence of platform derivatives launchings that corresponds best to market requirements and satisfies the operations constrains imposed by the platform design and the firm's strategy. This paper addresses this problem and proposes a method for planning the introduction of a platform's derivatives to market. The method is based on the assessment of the sequence of moves (switching) between product-segment pairs by using an integrated hypernetwork-based representation of the knowledge related to the products, operations and market(s).

Keywords: product-launch sequencing; platform products; operations strategy; operations-marketing interface.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2019.100163

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2019 Vol.32 No.2, pp.184 - 211

Accepted: 09 Oct 2017
Published online: 14 Jun 2019 *

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