TY - JOUR AB - Purpose– This research aims to analyze the potential of revenue management in the German car industry. The concept offers the chance for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to be more customer‐oriented to reduce costs and increase earnings. To implement revenue management, criteria are required to segment the customers. The car configuration changes and the delivery time look suitable in this context and this paper aims to analyze these.Design/methodology/approach– Survey analysis was conducted with 2974 German buyers of new cars. The respondents recently bought a car or were in the planning process of doing so. A total of 803 data sets could be evaluated statistically using SPSS software. Descriptive statistics and mean test were utilized to test several hypotheses and find out distinctions between the respondents.Findings– The results show that German car buyers could be segmented in to different groups according to the criteria: delivery time and configuration changes. This enables manufacturers to introduce revenue management and realize benefits in better customer orientation and improved supply chain planning.Originality/value– This research shows that German OEMs, especially the premium OEMs overestimate the value of change flexibility and short delivery times for their customers. The implementation of revenue management could help to reduce complexity and offer each customer the appropriate degree of change flexibility and the optimal delivery time combined with a process‐ and effort‐adequate pricing. VL - 21 IS - 4 SN - 1741-0398 DO - 10.1108/17410390810888697 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/17410390810888697 AU - Voigt Kai‐Ingo AU - Saatmann Michael AU - Schorr Sascha ED - Elkafi Hassini PY - 2008 Y1 - 2008/01/01 TI - Flexibility and revenue management in the automotive industry T2 - Journal of Enterprise Information Management PB - Emerald Group Publishing Limited SP - 424 EP - 439 Y2 - 2024/03/29 ER -