Decision support in the quotation process of engineered-to-order products

Sub-suppliers acting in the supply chain of the car industry have to adopt a strategy of products customization to be at the competitive edge. This is caused by the diversity of client's requirements that entails customer engineered products with a high level of variety. A business strategy based on engineered-to-order products requires systems for efficient generation of product variants. This also includes a need of decision support in the order preparation process as well as in the quotation preparation process. Decision support that gives access to detailed and accurate information in the quotation preparation enables a high level of product adaptation while ensuring company efficiency. By the introduction of a design automation system, this can be achieved. However, means to manage different application domains, projects, task knowledge and design information are required together with a possibility to perform detailed analyses on the system generated information. The objective of this work is to contribute in that area. Initially, a number of success criteria were identified and explorative work was conducted for the purpose to develop a conceptual model and principles that an application system would reside upon. The result is a framework consisting of an information model and underlying principles to be used when developing a design automation system for quotation preparation. A system founded on the framework supports management and analysis of quotations and product variants. The functionality and usefulness has been demonstrated and validated by a system implementation developed in collaboration with an industry partner. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.