Excess inventory? Pricing issue? High R&D expense?. Here is what you need to do in order to provide a product performance assessment in your slide notes. You create a cover slide, one each for R&D, Marketing, and Production, plus a reference slide .
Getting started “assessing” your product performance:
Go to the Courier and figure out the answers to these questions:
- What was my contribution margin? If below 30%, why?
- Excess inventory? Pricing issue? High R&D expense?
- How accurate was my forecast? Did I stock out or have excess inventory?
- If problems, figure out why. Forecast just off base? Product design issues? Your customer survey score will tell you something about your design relative to what the customers want.
- Now go to the segment section of the Courier to find out what happened from a competitive view
- How did you fare in terms of market share?
- What was your customer survey score relative to others? How can this be improved?
- Look at each criteria variable from a competitive assessment viewpoint.
- Was your design a good fit with customer criteria?
- Marketing investment?
- Pricing?
- Look at your revision date relative to the competition. Was there any delay in getting your product to market during the year?
After this, you will be much more capable in your decision making!
Remember the “Stars” are based on
- Contribution margin above 30%
- Making a Profit
- No emergency loan (put Big Al the Loan Shark out of business!)
- Satisfy at least 95% of demand for products
- Cannot carry more than 90 days of inventory
- Increase in stock price over last year
