Towards a Metric Between Engineering to Order and AssembleMake to Order Products in Configuration Situations Most companies that supply customized or configured product use product configuration systems (PCS). Especially in B2B for technical systems, it happens frequently that the supplier and his PCS cannot find a solution that fulfills all customer requirements because some of them are out of the company standard. In that case, if the supplier wants to make an offer, it is necessary to perform some engineering activities in order to propose a solution which fulfills the out of standard requirements. The key questions that come to the supplier in these situations are: Do we accept this out of standard demand? How far is it from our standard? What are the risks? The goal of this paper is to propose new metrics that can help to answer these questions.

An Operational Tool to Assess Configuration Lifecycle Maturity The use of product configurators is a wellestablished strategy for companies to support their productsu0027 different life cycle phases (engineering, sales, manufacturing, services). The configuration lifecycle management concept is highly relevant for complex configurable products. The business value gained comes in the form of improved leadtimes, quality, and costs; benefits perceived both internally by the company and externally by their customers, in the form of increased satisfaction. The size of these benefits is also related to the maturity of the organization with regards to configuration lifecycle management. Therefore, this paper examines an operational approach to assess the level of configuration lifecycle maturity. The focus is on how to guide manufacturing companies to achieve the full potentials from operating configurators across all lifecycle phases of their products. Furthermore, how to assess and improve the utilization of configurators across all productu0027s lifecycle phases within manufacturing companies will be elaborated. The findings of this paper are supplemented with a case study conducted at an engineering company that has been working with configurators for 10 years and it has now high emphasis on digitalization.