Evaluation of product variant-driven complexity costs and performance impacts in the automotive logistics with variety-driven activity-based costing

Product innovations, accelerated product life cycles, globalization, and increased customer requirements are challenges of the automotive industry today. Original equipment manufacturers face these challenges in offering multiple models, derivates, and options that affect the efficiency of processes and resources in logistics systems. To provide transparency over product variety-induced complexity, individual product variants, product variety and their impacts on logistics costs and performance need to be linked. Against this background, the authors develop an evaluation method to quantify these impacts focusing on the automotive logistics. This research provides a structured framework to account for impacts caused by product variety in order to support product variety decisions at an early stage in the product design phase. The method identifies relevant influences for measuring variant-driven complexity in logistics and highlights reciprocal effects among product vari ety, logistics costs and logistics performance. By integrating different logistics resources as well as dynamic factors, the research provides a unique evaluation approach in automotive logistics. Furthermore, the authors provide a case study proving the practicability.