Improving organizational agility and resilience within Engineer-to-order strategy

Abstract: Companies must be flexible and adaptable to compete in today's market. Those with such skills can better meet changing customer needs. Customization can add value by meeting customers' specific needs. Engineer-to-order (ETO) is used as a strategy to meet customer needs. High-mix, low-volume products are promoted. This creates uncertainty about the demand that the organization needs to deal with in a fast and efficient way, which results in applying agile as an approach to dealing with uncertainty. In addition, the organization needs to be more resilient to the vulnerability to which the market exposes the organization. However, at the same time, the organization needs the ability to make sense of the state of its environment, detect new threats, adopt new technologies and organizational attributes, and contribute to its resilience. However, it is unclear how to simultaneously develop an agile-based manufacturing strategy and a more resilient organization. Evidently, research is limited regarding the management of both the ability to move quickly and easily (Agile) and the organization's capacity to rapidly adapt to and respond to all types of risks (Resilience) within complex ETO organizations. In light of this, the purpose of this study is to investigate how agile and resilient practices can be implemented in ETO organizations to facilitate the production of complex or specialized products, as well as the capacity to absorb stress, recover essential functionality, and thrive under altered conditions. This study has primarily adopted a qualitative methodology, which uses both a case study approach and a literature review. The case study is based on interviews, a document study, and questionaries. The result from this study presents critical areas to improve from the point of view of agile and resilient practices so that the organization can have better performance and productivity. Improving areas such as communication, management style, the development of a model and knowledge management, the desired organizational structure, and the customer's role is essential in order to increase the organization's efficiency and decrease its uncertainty and risks.