Strategien zur wettbewerbsfähigen Organisation des Engineerings kunden

Strategien zur wettbewerbsfähigen Organisation des Engineerings kunden-spezifischer Produkte - Wie viel Standardisierung verträgt Individualität?

Researcher:        

O. Willner

Short lead times at low costs are generally regarded as a competitive advantage for customer-specific products. Customer-specific products that are fully developed or adapted to customer specifications within order fulfillment are called engineer-to-order (ETO) products. Since order-specific engineering tasks demand more than half of the delivery lead time for this product type, efficient engineering processes have a significant effect on the performance of an ETO company. Discussions with company representatives revealed that very few companies have thorough experiences with the design and implementation of efficient engineering processes. A literature review further confirmed that the mechanisms leading to efficient engineering processes in the ETO environment have hardly been explored.

The objective of this dissertation is to develop models, concepts and strategies leading to fast and cost-efficient engineering processes in ETO companies. Its main outcomes are as follows:

(1) An ETO-Classification that supports companies in developing appropriate engineering strategies;

(2) A decision model for design automation that identifies the factors influencing the appropriate degree of design automation; and

(3) An overview of the success practices and configurations for a global engineering in ETOcompanies.

This dissertation is meant to increase the competitiveness of ETO companies. Methodologically, the results presented in this dissertation were collected in three series of case studies with nine companies from the mechanical engineering sector. The empirical research was supported by an in-depth literature review. This dissertation consists of two parts:

Part I introduces the topic, identifies the research gap, presents the research methodology, and sets the results of the separate paper projects in the context of the whole dissertation.

Part II comprises the eight research papers on which this dissertation is based (a scientific journal publication, two scientific conference publications, four industry publications, a working paper).