Assortment policy - The subject of the assortment or program policy is the optimal design of a company's range of services. There are basically three decisions to be made:
- Which services should be offered? (Assortment content)
- How many services should be offered? (Range of products)
- When and for how long should the individual services be offered? (Offer time)
The content of the range relates to the company's object. This decides which markets or industries are to be worked on. There are four starting points for designing the content of the range:
- Problems of the customer
- Know-how of the provider
- Competitive products
- Material of the products
The design of the range raises the following question: How wide and deep should the range be? There is no practical method for solving this simultaneous decision problem. The range of products can therefore only be optimized approximately.
The third decision problem in assortment policy is to optimize the range of services over time. The dynamic optimization of the content and scope of the range takes place through the elimination of old products, the introduction of new products and changes to existing products, ie through the coordinated design of the life cycles of the individual products.
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