Configuration Lifecycle Management – An Assessment of the Benefits Based on Maturity

To handle the increasing product complexity manufacturing companies of configurable products tend to utilize configurators to cover more lifecycle phases of their products. This is described as configuration lifecycle management (CLM) and it is concerned with the management of all configuration models across a product’s lifecycle. However, to connect and align all configurators and IT systems to each other remains a challenging task. Apart from the technical perspective, on an operational level the integration and alignment of the IT systems also requires a structured approach and is highly related to the maturity of the organization. Therefore, this research focuses on studying the relation between the maturity level and the expected benefits from implementing CLM. It is expected that the more advanced an organization is in using product configurators in different lifecycle phases and integrating and aligning them to each other and to other IT systems, the realized benefits would be significantly higher than the sum of benefits from applying standalone configurators to support each life cycle phase. Empirical evidence from seven case studies demonstrate that there is a relation between the maturity and the realized benefits with regards to the utilization of product configurators.