Product modeling of configurable building systems - a case study

This paper investigates a Swedish house manufactures building system regarding the documentation and information structures. The aim is to evaluate how product modeling technology can be used to facilitate product customization. By dividing the product in four different views the complexity of the product can be reduced and each view represent the interest of customer, engineering, production and assembly respectively. The analysis shows that the connections between the different view, i.e. the information transfer, is an area for potential improvements and little attention has been devoted to transfer information upstream from manufacturing and engineering to the customer view. The lack of information transfer can often lead to ad-hoc solutions in the customization process. We believe that successful cooperation and information exchange between these four views is the key to future development and customize-to-order configuration.