Towards a collaborative approach to sustain engineer-to-order manufacturing

Today, companies know that product customization can help gaining competitive advantage; consequently, new approaches and tools are still needed to sustain new processes of product development. This paper aims at describing a conceptual approach combining different actor's competencies and different available tools in order to manage efficiently Engineer-to-Order (ETO) product required by final customers. The proposed approach is initiated and developed within the European project “ESTIMATE”, Eurostars program. It reinforces the idea that achieving a successful customer order fulfilment passes by a thoughtful ETO processes. ESTIMATE's overall concept will be highlighted showing how the performance improvement could be reached through the described collaborative approach (modelled by BPMN and UML diagrams).