Portfolio-focused Management

Portfolio management has traditionally been ..... about getting new products to market and prioritizing budgets for R&D.

Improving efficiency and effectiveness in those areas is one of the key benefits of a systematic approach to portfolio management and explains why, in R&D-heavy industries, portfolio management is considered a critical management function in its own ......

Portfolio management can be the vital bridge between strategy and operations and the key method ..... which cross-functional and cross-departmental coordination and strategic alignment can be achieved.

In order to handle the complexity of the functions performed and through the pressures of growth and ..... of scale, companies have become completely organized around specific functions like Finance, R&D, Supply chain, Manufacturing, etc.

Budgets, target setting and the employees themselves have all become departmentalized by functional area, and this leaves top management with the task of ensuring that the sum of all those functions actually ..... value for the shareholders.

The basic principle is that the market value of a company is driven by the expected future net income from sales of products and services and the ..... that top management's primary goal is to optimize the value of a company.

It seems obvious that any strategic targets one might have set for maximization of the value of a company have to be translated to a product portfolio and through that into net future revenue ......

The simple fact that strategy turns into revenue only through having the right products in the marketplace at the right time and at the right price should put your current and future product portfolio ..... in the middle of your whole company's focus.

However, transparency into the complete portfolio, the currently commercially marketed one as well as the planned products, is often lacking due to geographic fragmentation and inconsistencies between information systems ..... the data about these products.

The different functions that are very product-..... (R&D, Sales/Marketing, Supply Chain), tend to use different definitions and tools when it comes to product-related planning.