One of the big problems in the industry is eliminating products from the portfolio. Often the sales team does not prioritize its marketing and production volumes are small and end up generating complexity in the factory, as it is necessary to carry out production setups and manage all the devices and tooling exclusive to this line. When questioning sales it is difficult to get the answer that we can eliminate the product, as it generates conflict with customers who still buy.
In this company of the industrial branch, 2 processes were developed with the objective of reducing the manufacturing complexity.
The first is to eliminate the product line without developing a replacement product. This process evaluated all impacts in the chain, in particular, the minimum replenishment time for technical assistance components.
The second was to readjust the process of developing new products, which ended up not considering all the variations of the existing line. The effect of this was always to generate new products without putting an end to some variations of the existing ones. In this process, we included in the development phases interchangeability analyzes and solutions so that the unique components of the current platform could be used in the new platform.
The main result of these adjustments had a strong impact on the profitability of the products, since, by eliminating products from the portfolio, production costs were reduced due to the reduction of production setups, in addition to reducing the cost of maintaining the tools and molds that were maintained for these small production volumes.
Adjustment of the Product Portfolio and reduction of Manufacturing Complexity
