For shops where engineering comes first.
If a customer specification has to become drawings and a custom bill of materials — reviewed and signed off — before anything is fabricated, you run engineered-to-order. ARKcelerate is built around that design, approve, build and ship loop.
The problem
Catalogue ERPs assume the BOM already exists.
A catalogue ERP starts from a finished, fixed bill of materials and never expects it to change. Engineered-to-order is the opposite: the BOM does not exist until engineering creates it, the customer must approve drawings before fabrication starts, and revisions keep arriving while the job is live.
So the parts of an ETO job that carry the most risk — the custom BOM, the approval round-trips, the engineering changes — get tracked outside the ERP in drawings folders and email. The system can no longer tell you which drawing revision is in production, or what the order actually cost.
How it works
Built for the design-to-dispatch loop.
A custom BOM per order
Build the bill of materials for each engineered item directly — no inventing a one-off product in the item master just to make a BOM exist.
Approvals that gate production
Track every drawing revision and customer sign-off. Fabrication works to the approved version, and that same version drives the QC inspections downstream.
Change-safe BOM versioning
An engineering change versions the BOM without silently rewriting manufacturing orders already released to the floor — the shop keeps building the version it was given.
The approved revision is the single source of truth
Quality always inspects against the revision the customer signed off, so "which version is correct?" is never a question on the floor.
Actual-vs-estimate costing
Every cost is tagged to the project, so you can compare what an engineered order was quoted at against what it truly cost — and price the next one better.
Explore more
Related solutions & industries.
FAQ
Common questions.
What is an engineered-to-order (ETO) ERP?
An ETO ERP is built for manufacturers who design each order before building it. It supports custom BOMs, customer drawing approvals, engineering changes and project-based costing, rather than assuming a fixed catalogue of products.
What is the difference between ETO and make-to-order (MTO)?
Make-to-order builds a known design only after an order is placed; engineered-to-order designs or significantly re-engineers the product for each order. ARKcelerate supports both, since both revolve around a per-order project rather than a stock product.
How are customer drawing approvals handled?
Each drawing revision is tracked through customer sign-off. The approved revision is what production builds to and what quality inspects against, so an unapproved version cannot quietly reach the floor.
Is this the same as project-based manufacturing?
Engineered-to-order is the engineering-first case within project-based manufacturing. If your differentiator is custom design and approvals, start here; for the broader project-as-spine picture, see our project-based manufacturing ERP page.
Run the design-to-dispatch loop in one place.
Start a trial, or talk to the engineers who built ARKcelerate to run their own engineered-to-order factory.