Approach of Partial Front-Loading in Engineer to Order

Technical changes are an integral part of engineer to order product manufacturing. External as well as internal causes require these modifications throughout the entire product manufacturing process. Various factors prevent full front-loading, which provides for early implementation of the modifications. In this paper a method of partial front-loading is presented. Accordingly, the progression of the process is considered in the development of alternative solutions for change implementation. The data representation of the production processes, the digital shadow, is an essential part of the approach. This enables the filtering of alternatives based on the time progression. With the additional technical evaluation of the options, a two-stage validation is created. The necessary requirements for the extension of the existing engineering change management models are defined. A practical use case serves as a basis for the evaluation of the front-loading approach in engineer to order. In addition to the actual approximation of the front-loading target curve, the percentage of rejects is assessed.