Utilizing product configuration systems for supporting the critical parts of the engineering processes

Engineering-To-Order (ETO) companies have to respond to increasing demands to provide highly customized and complex products with high quality at competitive prices. In order to respond to those challenges ETO companies have started to implement product configuration systems (PCS) to increase efficiency of the specification processes. As a result to complex products and processes in ETO companies, PCS are usually gradually implemented where only subsets of the products are included to support specific processes. However, a systematic way to identify and evaluate the products and the processes to be supported with the PCSs is not described in the current literature. This paper aims to pursue that research opportunity by presenting a framework, which aims to identifying the critical parts of the engineering processes in order to identify where it most beneficial to implement a PCSs and how to prioritize the future PCSs projects.