Towards a Metric Between Engineering to Order and Assemble/Make 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.