Product Structure Modelling for the Made-to-Order Environment

Abstract

Product structure is the key information widely used by various business activities performed at different departments and different stages. In the made-to-order environment, product structure representation becomes more complicated because each product can have many variants with slightly different constitutions to fulfill different customer requirements. In such a context, product structure management comes to two interrelated functions: family structure management and variant structure management. At the same time, these two functions need to be seamlessly integrated to ensure the consistency of a family structure and its variant structure. From the business process perspective, throughout the entire product lifecycle, different business activities look at product structure with different purposes. Some activities are carried out based on variants and deem individual variants as different products and some need to be performed based on an entire family. As such, it is imperative to develop a product structure model that is capable of flexibly representing product families and product variants to serve up different processes in a product lifecycle. In this paper, a product structure model based on a master-variant pattern is proposed. The model can explicitly represent common characteristics of a family and particular characteristics of individual variants. Moreover, the variant structure representation is built on the top of the family structure representation. As a result, it provides an effective means to synchronize two types of structures. It also makes product family and variant concepts transparent to various business processes so that effective support can be provided to processes integration in the made-to-order environment.