The German financial services market is in deep crisis. Deregulation and the new means of communication have fostered competition and made the market a transparent level playing field. Moreover, customers increasingly demand individualized solutions to their financial problems. Many financial...

Component commonality - the use of the same version of a component across multiple products - is being increasingly considered as a promising way to offer high external variety while retaining low internal variety in operations. However, increasing commonality has both positive and negative cost...