Complexity Management in Engineer-To-Order Industry: A Design-Time Estimation Model for Engineering Processes

The engineer-to-order (ETO) industry’s business environment constantly changes, which results in challenges related to project management, on-time delivery, quality, and market competition. Companies face pressure to optimize production while demand for personalized products, and accordingly the complexity level increases. To address these challenges, companies require to identify the most important complexity drivers to improve planning, get a better overview of the resource allocation, and improve internal processes. This study proposes a design-time estimation model based on the most important complexity drivers: 1) Functional requirement, 2) Number of technologies, 3) Level of connectivity, 4) Regulation and standards. This study presents key complexity drivers for assessing the expected hours to design a product in an ETO industry. Complexity drivers are explored qualitatively and quantitatively from (i) literature review; (ii) internal regular meetings and; (iii) data analysis. The gathered complexity drivers are weighted and combined in order to develop the mathematical design-time model. Finally, an IT-tool is prototyped to test the mathematical model at the case company. The application of the developed IT-tool is also tested at the case company to prove the usability.