A Concept for Order Change Management in ETO Supply Chains

Order management might incur substantially challenging tasks for Engineer to Order (ETO) type manufacturing companies. A significant number of engineering changes and variations during the order management process constantly occur. These changes lead to modifications in product, design and engineering, and material management phases and ETO companies must react on these changes appropriately. Eventually these modifications compel changes in the project schedule as well. This study primarily focuses on the material management issues implied by the engineering changes and aims for developing a conceptual framework aiding these challenges, in sync with the management of entire project to deliver the product efficiently in time and cost wise. The applied research methodology is qualitative exploratory research. The data is collected theoretically and empirically. The relevant literature is reviewed and a case company from the shipbuilding industry is studied and represented in this paper. Limitations of this research appear due to the lack of literature in this field and single case study approach which reduces the chances to generate the results. However this study contributes to theory by increasing the understanding of EC problems in association with the