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1. Introduction
The importance of product customisation has been popularised by a wide range of published work (Lampel and Mintzberg, 1996; Pagh and Cooper, 1998). Customer-driven manufacturing has been positioned as a key concept for the factory of the future, and many companies have responded by seeking to develop customer-driven manufacturing systems (Rudberg and Olhager, 2003; Wortmann et al., 1997). This can be done in a variety of different methods and degrees. A useful way to consider the gradations of customisation possible, developed to facilitate control over the flow of goods, is offered by the customer order decoupling point (CODP). The CODP describes the way in which customer orders penetrate the “basic structure” of operations, indicating how deeply a customer order enters into the goods flow (Hoekstra and Romme, 1992). It has since been conceived of as a strategic stocking point that provides a buffer between fluctuating customer orders and smooth production output (Naylor et al., 1999). Upstream of the CODP, activities are typically speculative, aggregated and standardised; downstream of the CODP, activities are typically predictable, attached to known orders, individualised and customised (Lampel and Mintzberg, 1996; Olhager, 2003; Rudberg and Wikner, 2004).
Using the CODP concept, a range of structures can be defined to give a simplified classification of supply chain types. These range from very repetitive “make-to-stock” (MTS) supply chains to a very customised “engineer-to-order” (ETO) structure (Gosling et al., 2007; Hoekstra and Romme, 1992; Olhager, 2003). In the latter type, each item is, to a degree, unique, and the client will often engage with the design process (Gosling and Naim, 2009). Consequently, a much closer integration, and more sophisticated understanding, of the interface between engineering and the whole supply chain is needed (Dekkers et al., 2013; Hicks et al., 2000). To give a more refined way of understanding this interface, a small selection of papers have developed classification systems for design and engineering activities based on CODP-related concepts (Dekkers, 2006; Giesberts and Tang, 1992; Gosling et al., 2011; Wikner and Rudberg, 2005a; Winch, 2003). This paper develops understanding in this area, giving a much richer definition of the CODP concept as applied to engineering activities and the degree of novel engineering required of a particular project.