The encyclopedia · Product & Design · Product decision · 2014–2017
Barco cut product-development time 46% by deciding how many platforms to build
Barco's medical screens sprawled into costly variants; an optimization model chose how many platforms to build and cut development time 46%.
Barco
the move
Barco's healthcare division built many versions of high-tech display screens, and product-variety proliferation was pushing up development cost and slowing delivery.
The naive answer is to delete variety, but Barco wanted to keep offering options while cutting the cost of creating them.
The move was a mathematical optimization to choose the number of platforms to develop and which products to assign to each, producing multi-functional platforms that serve several products from one design.
Result: product development time fell 46% and on-time customer deliveries rose 8%.
why it works
- A shared platform amortizes design and tooling across many products.
- The optimization balances platform count against the cost of over- and under-serving each product.
- It turned a design-strategy guess into a measured portfolio decision.
- Fewer, better-shared platforms meant faster development and more reliable delivery.
what transfers
Variety is expensive when every product carries a full design. Optimize how many shared platforms you build and what rides on each, and you keep the offering while cutting cost and speeding delivery.
what came after
The work made Barco a finalist for the 2017 INFORMS Franz Edelman Award and showed a manufacturer could cut development time by nearly half and lift on-time delivery by choosing platforms mathematically instead of by instinct.
references
- Team with IÉSEG professor selected as a finalist for the 2017 INFORMS Franz Edelman Award
- Introduction: 2017 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences
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