Managing operations in a high product variety context: preliminary lessons from Italian firms

It is an incontrovertible fact that firms are increasingly expandig therir product offer - offering the customer with an increasing number of options and variants - in order to keep up with competition, especially in many mature markets. Expanding product variety poses great managerial challanges to the firm, as it tends to reduce repetitiveness in operational processes. The present paper presents the preliminary results of an interview study exploring what are the practices firms adopt in order to ensure operations efficiency in conditions of high product variety. From the analysis of the interviews it emerges that also firms offering relative low variety are adopting practices that are typically described as typical of high product variety environments. However, firms characterised by high product variety tend to adopt more advanced precatices for product variety management