The German Automotive Industry is facing a challenging market environment: the dynamic relating to society, legislative, customers and technologies is growing. The industry`s solution for these challenges are expanded product portfolios with an increasing number of product variants customized for specific market needs. Moreover, lifecycles of products and technologies become shorter. Thus, the pressure of competition regarding established companies is rising. Facing this problem statement the thesis on hand aims a method to plan a strategic product portfolio. Starting with the analysis of influence factors, potential scenarios for the considered market are determined. Afterwards, product concepts are described; the sustainability of the product concepts is assessed using the scenarios. The selected product concepts are positioned in a strategic product map with reference to current products of the own company and those of competitors. For the prioritized product concepts characteristics are deducted using a combinational logic. The partial result of the method is a decision document for each prioritized product concept. To monitor the premises of the product concepts, a “Product-Scorecard” is established. The applicability of the method on hand is proved by a validation project in the automotive industry. |