Consumers want more variety than ever before. This means product design needs to be rethought to avoid multiple and costly production lines.
In any supermarket or retail store these days, the amount of product variety is tremendous, nearly overwhelming. What is the cost of our need for choice and how can it be mastered?
In our paper, The Impact of Product Variety on Logistics Performance, the late Professor Xavier de Groote and I found when a production line must incur non-negligible set-up time switching from one product to another for a given amount of products, the lead time to bring the product to market increases significantly, adding to costs and making products less profitable.
