PCAT: A Software System for Cross-Product Commonality Analysis in Engineer-to-Order Manufacturing

Engineer-to-Order (ETO) manufacturers face persistent cost and complexity challenges driven by product variety, including duplicate components, redundant variants, and inconsistent procurement setups. Although enterprise resource planning (ERP) and product lifecycle management (PLM) systems contain detailed Bills of Materials (BOMs) and procurement records, they typically lack portfolio-wide support for systematic cross-product commonality analysis without substantial manual effort. Prior approaches are either conceptual (e.g., indices and modularity frameworks) or ad hoc in practice, often relying on one-off spreadsheet analyses. This paper introduces the concept of Product Commonality Analysis Tools (PCATs) and develops and evaluates a lightweight PCAT in an action-research collaboration with a European ETO laser manufacturer. The PCAT operates on exported enterprise data to provide interactive portfolio-level views of component reuse and cross-product consistency. Its usefulness is evaluated through scenario-based think-aloud usability sessions and a functional comparison against Excel workarounds, standard ERP/PLM reporting, and vendor customizations. The results indicate that a lightweight PCAT can be integrated into existing ERP/PLM workflows with minimal disruption and can reduce the effort required to prepare reusable portfolio views for engineering and procurement reviews.