Ask yourself a few simple questions. Just how many items (SKUs) are there in your company's product range? How did it get to be that way? Does it matter? And what can be done about it?

In many food businesses, the SKU count is far greater than optimal. It got that way not by design but by a combination of factors equating to an ever-increasing range. Like weeds in a garden, product ranges just keep on growing unless an active effort is made to control them. The profit penalties of excessive range proliferation are too great to ignore.

Only a concerted effort over time can make progress in partially remedying the problem.

The pressures driving range increase are several. At one end of the system, the constant customer-driven pressure for innovation combines with NPD ideas from a whole range of sources to add new lines at a rapid rate. In the middle, the lack of active range management results in missed opportunities to shape the range. And at the far end, many businesses are slow to chop out poor sellers for a variety of reasons. The cumulative result is a one way ticket to increased range, complexity, and cost. Over the coming months, we will examine a number of approaches for tackling this set of challenges.

Nick Wright