Project portfolio selection considering total cost of ownership in the automobile industry

Abstract

Project portfolio selection for developing a new product is critical to a company because the attributes of the project reflect on the price, quality, and functionality of the developed product. The market evaluates the developed product and the assessment of the product value determines its sale on the market. The project portfolio selection and sales are interconnected from a corporate perspective. The automobile industry is an industry which responds to the issue of business sustainability sensitively because their business directly relates to the environment. In this study, business sustainability was approached through the perspective of total cost of ownership (TCO) embedded into the project selection model after the attributes of the project, investment and efficiency, and the TCO of the product were combined to generate a sales function. The sales and revenue models were proposed, and the validity of the models was confirmed using a case from the automobile industry. As a result of the experiments, the sales model tended to show that the market share increased by selecting the proper number of projects to maximize sales. In contrast, the revenue model showed a tendency to select projects more than the sales model in order to maximize the profits of the company. By suggesting project selection models in a new perspective different from the ones in existing studies, this study is valuable with regard to the fact that the suggested models preserve project interrelationships, TCO, and product sales in a practical manner to enhance business sustainability.