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Intonational Marketing Channels

For example, approximately 80% of the revenues of H-P are from
products they did not sell five years ago.
MANAGING PRODUCT LINE

Businesses in nearly every industry are more complex today than they
were just three to five years ago, and this trend shows no signs of stopping.
Because of this, managing complexity is becoming critically important to
the success of today's businesses. Without clear awareness of the benefits
and costs of complexity, and processes to manage the tradeoffs between
the two, we may be allowing hidden costs to erode our profits, or we may
miss opportunities for growth. Hewlett-Packard also faces these
challenges. Over the years, our team of operations research professionals
has developed an approach that we believe is widely applicable. In this
article, we describe our framework for managing one aspectof complexity
- namely, product line complexity- and share some examples of how we
have applied the approach at HP.
PRODUCT LINE COMPLEXITY

The term "complexity" means different things to different people. To

a procurement professional, complexity may manifest as a large and
growing number of suppliers and supplier relationships. In the factory,
complexity may refer to the number of both components and final
products in inventory. For a product planner, complexity may mean the
scheduling and allocation of finished goods across multiple factories and
sales channels. A change at one point - a supplier, a component, a
product - can have cascading effects across organizations and even
customers. This article focuses on complexity in product line offerings - in
terms of the number of products and the degree of part commonality
among the products - and its impact across the supply chain. We share
our approaches for measuring the costs and benefits of product line
complexity, and for making tradeoffs between the two to right-size
one's product line.
FACTORS AFFECTING INTERNATIONAL PRICE DETERMINATION

In the United States, we consume millions of barrels of oil daily in

the form of the gasoline that powers our vehicles, jet fuel for air travel
and a multitude of other oil reliant products. When we think about oil
prices, we typically get no further than begrudgingly recounting how
much we spent on our last fill up at a gas station or contemplating the
ever fluctuating price per gallon. However, numerous factors influence
the price that the end consumer pays at the gas pump, a few of which
we will observe here. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting