Improving Decision Making in the Early Phases of Configuration Projects

Authors

  • Neils Henrik Mortensen Department of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark
  • Ulf Harlou Institute of Product Development, Technical University of Denmark
  • Anders Haug Department of Manufacturing and Engineering Management, Technical University of Denmark

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.23055/ijietap.2008.15.2.119

Keywords:

Product configuration, early phases, modeling, product variety, visualization

Abstract

During the early phases of configuration projects very important decisions are made which will heavily influence the performance of the company, benefits in different functional areas (production, sales, purchase, product development, service etc), maintenance of the configuration system and quality of the dialogue between the configuration system and the users. Today there exists very sparse tools and procedures which can assist the early phases, i.e. conceptual modeling of the products and prod¬uct assortment. This paper presents a five-phase procedure for conceptual mod¬eling in configuration projects. Each of the five phases is sup¬ported by a set of tools. The main idea of the pro¬cedure is utili¬zation of a so-called Product Family Master Plan, which is a formal description of the product assortment and its variation. The procedure has been tested at one of Baan's (SSA Global) cus¬tomers with very convincing results.

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Published

2022-02-25

How to Cite

Mortensen, N. H., Harlou, U., & Haug, A. (2022). Improving Decision Making in the Early Phases of Configuration Projects. International Journal of Industrial Engineering: Theory, Applications and Practice, 15(2), 185–194. https://doi.org/10.23055/ijietap.2008.15.2.119

Issue

Section

Production Planning and Control