Nowadays, manufacturing companies have to deal with challenges such as high product varieties, unpredicted demand patterns, high customer’s lead time, large numbers of components with high lead times and usage rate and greatly reduced product lifecycles in order to gain competitive advantages. In order to manage the challenges properly, effective materials and manufacturing resources management and control which involve the management of variety, flexibility of suppliers and a responsive Master Production Scheduling system are required.
The manufacturing systems are the crucial criteria of realization to produce different kinds of productions. The adopted policy of management will be different based on whether the product is common or specific.. When a product is defined properly and developed, it will belong to “on catalogue” products. The manufacturing is done according to Make to order (MTO), Make to stock (MTS), Assemble to order (ATO) or Engineer to order (ETO) environments. The descriptions for the four manufacturing environments …show more content…
Each customer order results in a unique set of part numbers, bills of material, and routings. ETO environments are the slowest to fulfill because time is required not only to build the product, but to custom design it to meet the customer's unique requirements.
From the figure below, it can be concluded that ETO takes the longest delivery lead time as there are a lot of processes such as design, planning, manufacturing, sub-assembly and final assembly are involved while ATO takes the shortest delivery lead time.

Figure 1: Manufacturing strategies and their effect on the delivery lead