represented by Information System systems able to handle the business information and to share them by supporting decision-making processes and by easing the engineering department .
These Information System solutions require a common database useful for tendering, design, procurement and project management, which generates and shares knowledge in the organization.
Even if each order is unique and one of a kind, some contributions highlight the importance to have a database, which allows efficient reuse of previously designed components, despite new products variants .
This permits engineer-to-order companies to satisfy, with timeliness and efficiency, customers’ requirements.
Although cumulative knowledge is necessary, it is difficult to create it, as engineers generally do not have efficient methods or tools to manage information about past projects and translate them to the new ones .
Some contributions highlight the need to formalize knowledge and information of the products through Information Technology systems in order to build the models that contain knowledge and information about the products and, based on this, they are able to derive new specifications for product characteristics and their life cycle properties .
These solutions have been formalized for relatively simple products, but in recent years they have been applied also for more complex products .
We think that these models would be useful also for the engineer-to-order companies because their principle is to make the technical knowledge of the engineer explicit to the rest of organizations, easing the workload of engineering department, as principle actor in the quotation process of the engineer-to-order companies.