A Method for Modelling Business-Critical Architecture Decisions in Engineer-to-Order Companies

Featured Application: The developed method is intended for engineer-to-order companies with a high product variety and who have decided to pursue modular product architectures as a means to address the negative effects of product variety. This article presents a method (the cross-functional architecture matrix, CAM) for identifying the most business-critical architecture decisions for companies applying product architectures to support the design and production of customised and highly engineered products. Although the product architecture literature describes the value of product architectures and suggests concepts and methods for modelling product architectures, existing methods tend to focus on a select few parts of the value chain or a few functional disciplines despite engineer-to-order (ETO) companies being highly cross-functional. Furthermore, the literature suggests that the practical implementation of product architectures is hindered by the complexity of the architecture models and the large number of decisions involved in the implementation and maintenance of the architecture. In this article, we test the suggested method in a case of a company that designs manufacturing plants (usually an investment in excess of 200 M€) and where three major equipment systems were chosen. For each system, cross-functional architecture matrices were applied. In each case, we found that only five architecture decisions had to be made to achieve significant improvements in the system’s performance, including a 30% reduction in installation hours, 76% of commissioning activities moved from the site to workshop, a 6% faster time to production, and a 12% total cost reduction. Practitioners in ETO companies can use the CAM method to support their product architecture development, while researchers can utilise it for future studies on the implementation of product architectures across functional domains and value chains.