Customization-based interaction in ETO

Sammanfattning: Customization is an important way for suppliers to offer value to customers and to be competitive. There is a variety of methods suppliers can adopt to offer customization. What they have in common is that some form of interaction between customer and supplier is required as customization is based on involving individual customers in specifying a solution to be produced. This can be achieved, for example, by allowing the customer to choose from components or values that have been defined in advance, later to be assembled or put together according to the customer's wishes. As the possibilities for customization are clearly defined in advance, the supplier can rationalize their procedure to capture customer needs and propose an appropriate solution. This differs from cases where the customer is already involved in the development, design, or engineering stage ± so-called engineer-to-order (ETO) scenarios. Here, the customer is not bound to predefined possibilities for customization, which means that the interaction required to define the solution can extend beyond that required when customization possibilities are predefined and thus limited. In this thesis, customization-based interaction in ETO is investigated, both with the intention of improving the understanding of interaction in this context as such but also to offer ways of explaining how some approaches to customization have implications for interaction that differ from others. The result of the research consists of an account of how interaction is manifested in ETO and how different approaches to customization can be understood to clarify their implications for how solutions are defined.