Towards customization: Evaluation of integrated sales, product, and production configuration

Unlike most of the available configuration solutions, the integrated sales, product and production configuration is proposed to help companies realize product customization from a holistic view. It achieves this by determining the functional features (i.e., sales configuration), possible product alternatives (i.e., product configuration), and production process alternatives (i.e., production configuration). With the presence of multiple alternatives, it is necessary to determine final products and production processes based on the evaluation. This study, thus, evaluates the product alternatives and production process alternatives, which are configured in the integrated configuration. In line with the fact that in practice, cost and time are two of the most important elements in quotation preparation, we develop evaluation models to minimize the production costs and completion time. In addition, to provide companies with better decision-making support in selecting product offerings, the proposed configuration evaluation computes the differences in terms of cost and time among all the product and production process alternatives. With the differences in cost and time, companies can opt for suitable selection with respect to time or cost and/or other factors, e.g., strategic objectives. A case application of temperature controllers is utilized to demonstrate the results of the proposed evaluation of the integrated configuration.