Automatic configuration of modularized products

In business to business manufacturing, a major competitive advantage comes from the personalization of the product for the customer. In order to customize a product, companies go through a long process of customer interviews and specialized product development processes: this results in a time-consuming design phase and in a highly variable production process. In this paper, a method to improve the efficiency of product development and manufacturing, keeping a high degree of customization, is presented. A standardization effort is performed to identify a set of interchangeable components and to define a set of functional constraints. The consequences of such standardization are a dramatic reduction of the time expected to design and produce an item, as well as in lowered degree of variability of both the manufacturing process and the warehouses content. The presented methodology has been applied to a manufacturer of ink dispensing systems.