Optimal Product Aggregation for Sales and Operations Planning in Mass Customisation Context : An Application in Automotive Industry

Sales and operations planning (S&OP) is a multi-actor tactical planning process that balances aggregate demand and capacities to deliver realistic production plans. The way demand is aggregated into product families (PFs) is crucial for the alignment sought by S&OP. The issue of gathering individual products into PFs is particularly challenging in the mass customisation (MC) context where products are depicted through combinations of attributes derived from a set of features. This paper introduces the aggregation scheme concept that refers to the subset of features used to constitute PFs. Several aggregation schemes may exist and deliver different performances from the perspective of the actors involved in the S&OP. A multi-objective model is designed to identify efficient aggregation schemes considering both sales and operations expectations. The model is implemented on data instances from automotive industry. The results highlight the existence of more efficient and balanced aggregation schemes than those currently used