The paper studies what kind of support could be applied to the management of partly configurable modular systems. The main tasks of product management, product portfolio management and product variety management are defined. In addition, a partly configurable product structure and modular system are defined. Because the limited support in the literature for managing partly configurable modular systems, the article reviews previous product development cases in which authors have been involved on lessons learnt basis, i.e., if the methods and tools used in the cases could provide support for the research objective. As a result, the existing definition of the modular system should be extended by the concepts of non-module and design decision sequence description when dealing with partly configurable modular systems. This is because engineer-to-order should be made possible in cases where it brings clear added value to the customer compared to completely pre-defined solutions that may limit the customer's interest in the offering. Tools to assess the impact of changes to the product offering are required. These should be taken into account in frameworks that are used in method and tool development.

The paper discusses the new aspects of services and product lifecycle management could bring to the manufacturing company presented in this paper as a case study. The paper starts with a literature review and continues on to the case study. In the discussion section the findings are presented, following a conclusion section, where plausible miniature scenarios for circling the problems found earlier are presented. The service orientation is discussed through product lifecycle management aspect. The main topics discuss about the practical problems that came forth during the research. Many of those could have been avoided if the possibility of service orientation had been taken into account earlier. Companies need to seek new ways for creating profit and differentiate among the competition. Differentiating through services is seen as a favorable decision, although the implementation might not be as straightforward. Adding services to a core product creates more opportunities for a customer, but also enhances the company´s position in the markets. The goal of this research is to give insight to the challenges that a modern manufacturing company faces when in transition. Practical problems, intra- and extra-company are presented with discussion, results and suggested outcome.

Research on partly configurable products is emerging. Key concepts of these types of products have been scarcely synthetized, as definitions of partly configurable products in high-variety, low-volume industrial context are limited. These products incorporate modular and integral designs, which calls for an overview on the relations of key concepts defining them. The problem is approached through an exploratory literature review, which allowed an overview of the key concepts over product modularity and partly configurable products. Those were synthetized further define partly configurable products. As a result, four types of partly configurable products are given. This review supports vantage over the key concepts and their relations for reuse with partly configurable products in academia. For practitioners the presented attributes and given examples support in understanding of concepts and their relations with partly configurable products.