An Extensible Product Structure Model for Product Lifecycle Management in the Make-to-Order Environment

This article presents a product structure model for developing product lifecycle management systems that is flexible for make-to-order environment. In the make-to-order business context, each product could have a number of variants with slightly different constitutions to fulfill different customer requirements. All the variants of a family have common characteristics and each variant has its specific features. A master-variant pattern is proposed for building the product structure model to explicitly represent common characteristics and specific features of individual variants. The model is capable of enforcing the consistency of a family structure and its variant structure, supporting multiple product views, and facilitating the business processes. A prototype as a proof-of-concept system is presented to illustrate the capability of the proposed extensible product structure model.