Design of a feature-based order acceptance and scheduling module in an ERP system

•Addresses order customization acceptance in collaborative production.•Uses a finer information grain level, i.e., at multi-facet feature modeling level.•A new customer feature used to handle dynamic and complicated customer requirement.•Proposes a framework for ERP unifying product and process models.•Prototype module within a commercial ERP system is designed. Customer-oriented manufacturing competes on timely responses to customer requirements, and precise scheduling control for delivery. This challenge demands engineering design and production planning to be fully integrated via advanced enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. This paper proposes a generic feature association method and a detailed framework that can unify product and process models in order to satisfy customer orders with small batch sizes and high variations. A conceptual solution is introduced by integrating two traditionally separate feature domains: design configuration features and manufacturing process features. To achieve the proposed method, a customer feature class is suggested for the characterization of customers’ profiles related to the manufacturer. An instantiated customer feature object functionally tracks each customer’s selection of product configurations related to its requirements, specific orders, and production schedules with dynamic associations to the live manufacturing capacity. With the new associative integration method, a preliminary order acceptance system (OAS) prototype system has been implemented within an ERP order management system and its conceptual structure model is demonstrated within a multi-facet feature framework.