From custom designs to a modular product platform

Challenge

Engineer-to-Order (ETO) companies face increasing pressure from shrinking margins, loss of engineering knowledge and international competition. Moving towards a Configure-to-Order (CTO+) approach can help by standardising recurring solutions while preserving the flexibility to meet specific customer needs.

However, making this transition requires companies to identify reusable modules and variants across their existing designs and translate them into a product variability model. Today, this is largely a manual and time-consuming process. Valuable knowledge remains scattered across historical designs, while engineers often rely on their own experience to select and adapt previous solutions.

As a result, engineering times remain high, onboarding new engineers is difficult and companies struggle to systematically reuse proven designs.

Project Goals

In this project (CUS2MOD), we aim to automate the transition from custom to modular design by extracting reusable product knowledge from historical CAD data. The project targets a 50% reduction in the time and cost required to create product variability models, helping companies accelerate their shift from ETO to CTO+.

Using AI-enhanced techniques, the project will identify recurring and potentially parametrised modules within historical 2D or 3D CAD designs. These building blocks will be linked with ERP-like data such as volumes, costs and supply-chain information to distinguish high-volume needs from niche variants.

The resulting modules can then be used to automatically populate product configurators. The project will also explore generative design suggestions and impact assessments when introducing new building blocks. In this way, CUS2MOD aims to help companies increase design reuse, capture engineering knowledge and shorten engineering and quotation lead times.