Mass customisation impact on bill of materials structure and master production schedule development

The customisation of a vehicle on a production line results from the assembly of several hundreds of alternative components. Bills of Material (BOM) are usually made for operational purposes (to define the list of components to be assembled on a vehicle), for planning (to anticipate component procurement needs) and for commercial needs (guide customer choice and prepare sales forecasts). In the automotive industry, the diversity of end products which results from this combinatorial process (several millions) is such as no solution proposed in the literature allows to easily list the BOMs for all these vehicles. In our paper, we describe and theorise a solution used for many years by several carmakers, which consists in introducing a commercial description of the products in addition to their common organic representation. We show that this solution is an extension of the generic and modular BOM theory, recognised to be the most advanced solutions proposed in the literature. While fully meeting commercial and production control needs, this product description paradigm has limitations when it comes to determining the Master Production Schedules (MPS) at end product level beyond the frozen horizon, as performed by several automakers. An alternative approach defining MPSs at alternative component level is proposed in the literature. However, this approach also has several drawbacks that we point out. To overcome these issues, we propose a number of possible strategic and organisational tracks of improvement.