Identifying profitable reference architectures in an engineer-to-order context

Abstract

Companies operating with an engineer-to-order (ETO) strategy are often challenged with generating the desired profit as a consequence of product volumes and high levels of product customisation. Profit margins are seen to vary greatly from project to project, which may partly be explained by a lack of references to guide design decisions. Specifically, new product offerings are often based on reuse of design knowledge, which is often not efficiently utilised, as the knowledge transfer and reuse across projects are unstructured, incomplete, or not providing a suitable reference for design specification. To address this issue, this paper presents a method for identifying reference architectures under the consideration of profitability. The method was developed by combining and extending known methods within the fields of product architecture and complexity cost estimation to cover part of the ETO domain. The method was tested in two companies, one producing industrial spray drying plants and the other providing solutions for the production of confectionary products. The findings suggest that a limited understanding of ‘preferred solutions' existed in the two case companies, and applying the suggested method to identifying reference architectures could potentially support a more profitable project execution.

KEYWORDS:

• Product design
• Engineer to order
• cost analysis
• reference architecture
• complexity cost

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Due to the nature of this research, participants of this study did not agree for their data to be shared publicly, so supporting data is not available.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martin Løkkegaard

Martin Løkkegaard holds a PhD from The Technical University of Denmark within the field of product standardisation, modularisation and platform development. He is currently engaged in a Postdoc position, setup in a close collaboration between the Manufacturing Academy of Denmark, Innovation Fund Denmark and The Technical University of Denmark.

Christian Alexander Bertram

Christian A. Bertram is a Ph.D. student at The Technical University of Denmark, where he did his master within engineering design and applied mechanics. His research topic forms a melting zone between product portfolio strategy development (e.g. standardisation and modularisation) and data driven approaches for product portfolio and design decisions. This ultimately condenses into fact-based data-driven product strategy.

Niels Henrik Mortensen

Niels Henrik Mortensen holds a PhD and a M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering and is employed as a Professor at the Technical University of Denmark. He is heading the section of Engineering Design & Product Development at the Department of Mechanical Engineering (DTU-MEK). He is also heading the Product Architecture research group at DTU-MEK. The main focus of the Product Architecture Group is development of procedures and methods sup – porting development of Product Families based on Architectures and Platforms.

Lars Hvam

Lars Hvam, Ph.D., is Professor at the Technical University of Denmark. He has been working on production architectures, complexity management and product configuration for more than 15 years as a teacher, a researcher and as consultant. He has supervised more than 15 Ph.D. projects on the production architecture, complexity management and construction and application of configuration systems.

Anders Haug

Anders Haug is Associate Professor of Information Management at the University of Southern Denmark. He received his PhD in Knowledge Engineering from the Technical University of Denmark. He has worked for several years in the private sector as a Software Engineer and Business Consultant. He has published more than 100 journal and conference articles. His current research focuses on manufacturing technologies, data quality, knowledge-based systems, and IT management.