Engineer-to-order: A maturity concurrent engineering best practice in improving supply chains

General Engineer-to-Order (ETO) design of product capacity projects among many others, includes design for large electric machine, huge centrifugal pumps, diesel/natural fuel power plant engines, steam turbine, boiler, ship power, et cetera. ETO is basically a product development process, which starts with a product specification and finishes with an engineering design as its deliverable. It rarely includes manufacturing processes. The main drawback is with issues concerning its long lead-time. Research shows that an excessive lead-time is more often than not caused directly or indirectly by factors related to the design phase. This chapter thus, endeavours to introduce a best practice concurrent approach for reducing the lead-time at an engineer-to-order product design/development stage by seeking to integrate business information technology systems in the design and operational phases. It also introduces a new concurrent best practice approach by way of seeking to integrate other related business systems, e.g., (Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)) such as (Enterprise Service Architecture (ESA) application processes with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)) as a platform for applications and processes for effective communication. Furthermore, the chapter presents and discusses a model of classical concurrent engineering (CE) ETO operational process. ETO key elements, ETO success factors, and series of state of the art ETO classical ERP engineering design tools, as well as the "best practice" product life cycle are all discussed.