Product Portfolio Management

Up until 2016, the company used to coordinate its schedules and its engineering planning activities across the entire product portfolio using Excel spreadsheets. 

As a result, there were always two different planning statuses – a long-term plan and a decision status reflecting current decisions from committees and board meetings. Team members had to take every single change decision for the long-term plan from meeting minutes and transfer them into an Excel document, which resulted in a significant amount of extra manual work. 

A German automobile manufacturer in the premium segment uses cplace for its strategic product portfolio management. The main focus of the application is the company’s production ramp-up management, which coordinates all activities from the first prototype through to series production. The ability to control interdependencies between several production ramp-ups effectively is crucial – letting too many variants of a model enter the market simultaneously should be avoided, while plants, Marketing and Sales should not be overburdened.

In a two-week Rapid Prototyping Project, collaboration Factory developed a solution prototype that reflects all vehicle projects and their interdependencies in a single data model using sophisticated visualizations.