Previously, several production strategies for customer order fulfillment have been discussed in the literature. These strategies can be classified as Make-to-Stock (MTS), Make-to-Order (MTO), Assemble-to-Order (ATO), and Engineer to Order (ETO) [42, 43]. These strategies differ with respect to where inventory is held in the system and where the production system is decoupled from the customer order [44]. The adoption of these strategies depends on the customer's willingness to wait, as discussed by Mather in his P/D relationship, where he compares the response time of the production system (P) with the customers' willingness to wait (D) [45 ]. The company's decision to adopt any of these approaches is of great strategic importance [46] as it strongly influences how a company carries out its production planning and control activities [47]. In an ATO environment, manufacturers typically hold inventories of standard parts and manufactured subassemblies that are assembled based on an individual customer's order. Therefore ATO is an order-based manufacturing strategy where products are produced once the order is received and shipped immediately thereafter. Previously, there was also talk of delayed product differentiation, a postponement of the shape [48], implemented in assembly systems to defer the differentiation of final product configurations. In a mixed product assembly, product differentiation points represent stages of specialization in the assembly system where each product begins to develop its own unique identity, thus differentiating itself from other variants in the family [49]. In this way it is possible to assemble a large number of customized products from a small set of basic components. However, order-driven production responds to swings in demand and thus… middle of paper… joint effort of product designers and manufacturing engineers. If done correctly, such redesign leads to a notable simplification of the assembly process and a reduction in total assembly time [55]. Likewise, the modularity of the product was highlighted as an important enabler that makes postponement implementation easier. Product modularity is a product system attribute that characterizes the ability to mix and match independent and interchangeable product building blocks with standardized interfaces in order to create product variants [56]. It separates the composition of the final products into parts and/or subsets that are common and those that are not [57]. Designing products around modular architectures leads to a significant reduction in production times as long production lines can be split into parallel production of modules [58].