Scoping a Product Configuration Project for Engineer-to-Order Companies

When implementing a product configuration system in a company making complex and highly engineered products, many decisions need to be made in the early phases of the project. This article presents a framework for supporting the initial scoping process and discusses experiences from applying the framework in an engineering company. The framework covers a number of topics, such as identifying the users of the configuration system, prioritizing the user requirements, defining the input and output and considering the overall functionality of the configuration system. Furthermore, the scoping process considers the availability of product knowledge to model into the configuration system, the level of detail and which particular product parts and aspects to include in the system.