Is your offering portfolio well organized or do you have a big number of individual offerings? What I am hearing a lot, not all companies have well structured offering portfolios, due to large range of product families and a big number of solutions and services.
I love the idea of modular offering portfolio, where products and services may be bundled into offering packages based on the customer needs and preferences. Modular design is an important principle in product design and IT architectures, but the same idea applies well also for offering design. Let’s review different approaches to build modularity into offering portfolio!
Offering bundling of product based solutions and services
Today, many products and solutions have become more and more complex, including physical hardware products or components, as well as software and sometimes even digital services. The terminology varies from company to company, but often solution layer is often used to combine products and services as solution, which is helping to solve a customer problem and creates customer value.
In addition to a solution itself, there may be additional services, such as delivery, installation and commissioning as well as training and technical support completing the solution itself. The solution and complementing service are often delivered as one-time transactional offering package.
There are many types of services, such as core services (basic maintenance and repair services) or advanced services (e.g. complex digital services), and different service elements may be bundled into the same offering package. Sometimes also services are referred as products or service products.
To summarize, offering can be a combination of products/components/solutions and services, with the common value propositions offered as a package towards customers. Do you have a common definitions in your organization for what is meant by offering, products, solutions and services? Without to go to too academic discussions, it is good to have
Bundling offering packages based on modular products, and services to support different customer needs
When thinking about modular offering, offering is composed of different independent modules, such as products and services. The same product or service may be included in many different offering packages, which may be designed to meet different needs of the customers. Modularity of offering may for example enable different types of service levels for different customers or tailored offering packages for different customer segments with differentiated value propositions.
Same services may be bundled based on the business model customers preferences
Customer may prefer different business models during the different life cycle phases, and some customers may prefer transactional purchasing, where as other prefer more predictable agreement based models. With the modular offering portfolio, same service elements may be packaged in a different ways based on the customer preferences.
Further reading:
Check out also previous post, which might be interesting: Ideas To Build Offering Portfolio – Which Offering Portfolio Dimensions Are Relevant For Your Organization? – Strategic Portfolio Management (strategic-portfolio-management.com)
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