The Use of Modelling Methods for Product Conﬁguration in Industrial Applications Lars Hvam, Martin Bonev, Anders Haug and Niels Henrik Mortensen Abstract Developing product conﬁguration system (CS) requires extracting and representing domain expert knowledge in appropriate product models. As acknowledged by researchers, this is often one of the most challenging activities in conﬁguration projects, where only little empirical insights have yet been reported. This article investigates the challenge on how industrial companies model their product CSs. The study is based on interviews of 18 industrial companies using CSs for conﬁguring customer-tailored products. It investigates the relationship between using a structured modelling technique for modelling product families relative to less or no formal approaches. Furthermore, the study explores the speciﬁc characteristics of conﬁguration set-ups with respect to size and complexity and their effect on product variant management and availability of product knowledge in organizations. The results empirically validate the need for a sug- gested systematic modelling approach for large and complex conﬁguration pro- jects and its positive effect on the overall performance of companies. Keywords Mass customization  Product modelling  Product conﬁguration  Object-oriented modelling L. Hvam  M. Bonev (&) Department of Management Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark e-mail: mbon@dtu.dk L. Hvam e-mail: lahv@dtu.dk A. Haug Department of Entrepreneurship and Relationship Management, University of Southern Denmark, Kolding, Denmark e-mail: adg@sam.sdu.dk N. H. Mortensen Department of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark e-mail: nhmo@mek.dtu.dk T. D. Brunoe et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the 7th World Conference on Mass Customization, Personalization, and Co-Creation (MCPC 2014), Aalborg, Denmark, February 4th - 7th, 2014, Lecture Notes in Production Engineering, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-04271-8_44, Ó Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014 529