How to Analyze and Quantify Similarities between Configured Engineer-To-Order Products by Comparing the Highlighted Features Utilizing the Configuration System Abilities

摘要

Engineering-To-Order (ETO) companies making complex and highly engineered products, face the challenge of delivering highly customized and engineered products with high quality and short delivery time. In order to respond to those challenges ETO companies strive to increase commonality between different projects and to reuse product related information. For that purpose companies need to be able to retrieve previously designed products and identify which parts of the design can be reused and which parts to redesign. This allows companies to reduce complexity in the product range, to decrease the engineering hours and to improve the accuracy of the product specifications. In this article we suggest a framework where product features from the company’s configuration system are listed up in order to compare with previously made products by retrieving information from internal ERP/PLM systems. The list of features consists of defining features with potential sets of values e.g. capacity, dimensions, quality of material, energy consumptions, etc. When identifying a specific previously designed product, it allows access to all of the specifications of the existing product along with the engineering hours used, materials used, and hours used in the workshop. The aim of this paper is to make a framework for setting up a database before starting the comparison.