JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

In large organisations today the amount of products is numerous and it is challenging for senior management to have proper control and understanding over all products. As the product is the most important aspect for an organisation to consider, senior management must have ability to manage investments on products and follow development of product related indicators. Managing products as investment on portfolio level, where products are divided into a limited amount of portfolios is a solution for achieving decent control over product investments on senior management level. Product portfolio management is decision making oriented, where the goal is to make the best possible strategic and financial decisions when allocating constraint resources across the entire product portfolio. The product portfolio management aims to increase strategic fit of chosen new product projects, balance in product portfolio and maximizing value of the products. The product portfolio management is constantly ongoing, cross-functional decision making function which is present in all lifecycle states of the portfolios. In this research the product portfolios are seen as investments for mainly internal use of a decision making process. The product portfolios are items that are embodied into the case company’s product data management system and the product portfolios have own lifecycle states. Approach in this research is constructive, where a current state of the case company is analysed and based on the analysis and the literature review a construction is established. The Research questions are: 1) What are the required product structures in product data management systems to support product portfolio management practices? 2) What are the information elements and their lifecycle states and what they should be in product data management systems to support product portfolio decisions? Results of this research are the current state analysis committed in the case company and the construction of product portfolio management structure and lifecycle states. In the construction a portfolio package is defined. The portfolio package is the item used for embodying portfolios into the information systems. An information model for implementing the portfolio packages into the product data management system is introduced. The construction also presents product structure for implementing the portfolio package into the product data management system. Relation of lifecycle states between the portfolio package and other items in a product hierarchy is assessed in a nested lifecycle model. Two models, required and recommended, are suggested for the company to consider for managing the lifecycle of the portfolio package item. All the results are validated from several perspectives.