What project management delivers to engineer-to-order? An analysis of a furniture company

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the industrial sector has witnessed a growth and economic instability in the current market. The need for sustainable efficiency has emphasized the importance of improving the production process to maintain or open domestic and foreign markets. Strategies like cost reduction, increased quality, production efficiency, and waste reduction are some initiatives considered by the industrial sector to overcome the challenge of improving efficiency in industrial activities. This paper aims to analyse the parallel between the requirements of Engineer-To-Order (ETO) production systems and Project Management processes to better understand how project management can support the production process in industrial sector companies. The established parallel is demonstrated by dividing it into the groups of project management processes in conjunction with literature related to ETO. Starting with a trace of the current state of a case study in a furniture company, BPMN was used as a tool to present the company’s restructuring processes based on the theoretical parallelism’s conclusions. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed processes enable companies to visualize their orders as a project, which can help them become more structured, productive, and efficient, thereby contributing to improving competitiveness.